UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS 

IN 

MODERN PHILOLOGY 

Vol. 2, No. 5, pp. 311-373 June 17, 1912 



SPENSER, THE SCHOOL OF THE 
FLETCHERS, AND MILTON 



BY 



HERBERT E. CORY 




UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS 
BERKELEY 




*^'»o9Hilff 



UNIVEESITT OF OALEFOSNIA PUBLICATIONS. 

catl^i^TTiL'JrsS^^r^^^^^^ J,-^ango for the pul,U. 

aU the pubUcations of the ^hrersitv wm^e^inf ««. ' ^^ libraries. Complete lists of 

''°° ™fJeT?o':°''''-^'"'" ^- "^'"'^ - '="^° ^ SchlUlng. Editors, Price per 
Cited as Univ. Calif. PubL Mod. Philol. 
^' ^^^^ll(S°^^L^t.^^' Puhllkmn, by W. E. E. Pinger. Pp. i-67. 



Vol. 1. 



2. Stu^es^iQ the Mar^^ello^sr by Benjar^^ '^ 



} 



1. Wi^ehn BuBch als Dichter, Kunstler, Psychologe, Tmd"phnosoph'"von * 
o n.J"^'' Winther. Pp. 1-79. September 26, 1910 ^"i^osopn, von 

June^'lo'igii^.^!"^ ^^''^''' ^^ ^''^''* e"oo;;^;"" pp:"8i":i82. 

3. Some Forms of the Eiddie" Q"uesttonand"to'e"E^^^^^ ^-^^ 



75 



"'^'ISI^rs.^Scre^^Si^fS^^^ '''''' ^^^^^ ^- ^-"^' H-^«^ -. Kutting. 
Vol.1. 1. Hiatus in Greek MeUc Poetry, by Edward Bull Clapp. Pp. 1-34. June, 

2. Studies in thesi"(iaus'e"""irco:^^^^^^^ *°-^^ 

TtS/pp^^r ^j\tufj%ir^ BrkeSe^'^S; 

'• "idr^Si^ ?^riot^^^^^^^^ 

.. ^-^^^^^0-^ofmr.ce to I.ucretlus."iirwIiiia^T.- Me^;-^^^^ 

^' ^^bv^wnUa,?.%^S'l^°'' ^ N«^ Method 7fDatiig" Ath;^^-"^cioi' 
KSrTl907) '^"'°"- ^P-JSM73. April 14. 1906 (reprint 

^* ^ Mari wSV !.!!'!.^!£^^^^^^^^ jo^"^""":^cra^'^oi""-ij:- i^^^^^ 

^* ^°w.S^^^? °'i^° ^eiationof "iioughrto" 

Washuigton Prescott. Pp. 205-262. Jnne, 1907 ^ ^^ «, 

Index, pp. 263-270. ~ •*** 

1. Some Te:rtual Criticisms on the Eighth Book of the De Vita Caesamm 

o.^Suetomus. by WHUam Hardy Alexander. Pp. l^sl NoveJK 



.26 

.60 
.28 



Vol. 2. 



.10 



4-^ 



UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS 

IN 

MODERN PHILOLOGY 

Vol. 2, No. 5, pp. 311-373 June 17, 1912 



SPENSER, THE SCHOOL OF THE 
FLETCHERS, AND MILTON 



BY 

HEEBEET E. COEY 



Critics have made merry with the literary alchemists who 
have striven to analyze Milton. By this study I confess alle- 
giance to what Mr. Walter Raleigh calls "the ledger school of 
criticism." Professor Ma.sson asserted that all attempts to find 
the sources of Milton are ' ' for the most part dull and laborious. ' ' 
Yet many adventurers in the delightful land of poetry will 
remain unsatisfied. We all know that a supreme genius exercises 
much of his creative instinct in the subtle art of selection. He 
ransacks the supreme poets of the past until they stir him to 
write. He chooses even from the conventions and commonplaces 
of a hundred minor men of his day, letting the worthless die, 
giving final expression to the best. When we follow him in his 
academe, play the eavesdropper as he listens to the elders of his 
deep-browed brotherhood, steal after him on his quiet walks to 
his favorite nooks, we are not blaspheming him. The figure of 
the exquisite flower, rent by the ruthless hands of the scientist, 
is overworked. When the analyzer of a great poet has finished 
his work he has not only increased our understanding and 
sympathy, but deepened the mystery and our reverence. 

Milton, one of the most composite of poets, certainly learned 
much of his eloquence from the gentle dreamer Edmund Spenser, 
who, in his turn, had distilled his magic from a myriad springs. 
The younger poet, indeed, was proud to call the singer of The 



312 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

Faerie Queene his master. ''Milton," said Dryden, "has ac- 
knowledged to me that Spenser was his original. ' '^ It has been 
said that Mathew Lownes, who published the folio edition of 
The Faerie Queene in 1609, furnished the boy Milton with a copy 
of Spenser.^ The publisher of the volume of 1645 contributed 
a preface in which, thinks Professor Mackail, "We can certainly 
hear an echo of Milton's owti voice and judgment." "I know 
not .... how harmonious thy soul is," writes the publisher, 
"perhaps more trivial Airs may please thee better. But .... 
let the event guide itself which way it will, I shall deserve of the 
age, by bringing into the Light as true a Birth, as the Muses 
have brought forth since our famous Spencer wrote ; whose Poems 
in these .... are as rarely imitated, as sweetly excell'd. " In 
his maturity Milton wrote of his master as "our admired 
Spenser"^ and, with characteristic appreciation of the lofty 
moral purpose of The Faerie Queene, as "our sage and serious 
Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than 
Scotus or Aquinas."* From Spenser, the well-beloved of all 
young poets, Milton learned much of that love for sensuous beauty 
that fought against his harsher Puritan characteristics and made 
him more wholesome. From Spenser's diction, a rich composition 
from choice obsolete words, from racy dialects and colloquial- 
isms, and from the poet's own fancy, Milton probably drew 
much which he fused with his sonorous borrowings from the 
Latin to build up a matchless poetic speech.^ Dryden, in his 



1 Preface to the Fables. 

2 Masson, Life, 1, 89, can find no authority for this statement of 
Todd's. See also John Mitford, Aldine Edition of Milton, 1857, p. iv: 
"Humphrey Lownes, the printer who lived in the same street, supplied 
him with Spenser. ' ' 

s Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus, 
edition of Prose Worlcs, Symmons, 1, 197. 

4 Areopagitica. 

5 The question of Milton's borrowings from Spenser's diction would 
make an elaborate linguistic thesis in itself. Many words, of course, 
could not be settled absolutely. We could not always tell whether Milton 
was drawing from Spenser or from some Chaucerian predecessor. We 
could not often tell whether he was borrowing from Spenser directly or 
from one of the many poets for whom Spenser had given the word cur- 
rency. I append a brief list of typical examples drawn from hundreds 
of words which the commentators have set down in their notes as taken 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 313 

Essay on Satire, gives interesting contemporary (if not infal- 
lible), testimony concerning Milton's free use of Spenser's 
words : 

"His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity, for therein he 
imitated Spenser as Spenser imitated Chaucer. ' ' 

Even if Milton did not take many words from The Shepheards 
Calender or The Faerie Queene, he found in Spenser stimulating 
suggestion for enriching poetic utterance with the neglected 
jewels of antique poets. 

But the boy Milton took some of his Spenser second-hand 
from contemporary Spenserians who, for the moment, loomed 
large because they w^ere in the foreground. The juvenilia of 
great poets are almost always tinged with the intermediary 
influence of the poetae minimi of the day who echo their masters 
with facile prettiness. So Keats, in his early work, took some 
of his Spenser with sugar and water from Hunt. By 1627 the 
names of Giles and Phineas Fletcher must have been prominent 
at Milton 's own university, Cambridge, where he was a novitiate 
in poetry for seven years. The Fletchers seized upon subjects 
which were in the air. In an age of religious poetry they wrote 
quaintly and often beautifully, in ingenious and eccentric 
allegory, of the life of Christ and of the soul of man. They 
borrowed reverently, but with naive freedom, from the riches 
of The Faerie Queene, which they ransacked from end to end 
for allegorical figures, memorable lines, sometimes nearly whole 
stanzas. Over all they embroidered the curious, stiff conceits 
that were everywhere high in favor. They were enthusiastic 
imitators of the Spenserian stanza. As Spenser had given new 
music to the eight-line stanza by the addition of a final alex- 
andrine, so the Fletchers experimented by adding the long line 
to the rhyme-royal, the ottava rima, and many other current 



from Spenser. I do not wish to defend them individually but to make a 
brief specimen list for the sake of general impressions. 

Assays (= assaults), cease (cause to cease), jolly (handsome), ragged 
(rugged), descry (describe), dainty limbs, hosting (an Irish word), 
arborets, infamous (so accented also in Spenser), say (tell), daintest, 
y-chain'd (and numerous other participles with y-), recure (recover), 
appaid, far-fet, recreant, in place (on this occasion), purfled, pranckt, 
turkis, prawest Jcnight, captiv'd, etc. 



314 University of California Pithlieations in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

forms. The influence of the Fletchers was far greater than has 
generally been realized. They founded a distinct school of 
poetry which outlived the chilling influence of the Restoration. 
Even in the eighteenth century the school survived in the work 
of William Thompson, one of the earliest definite romanticists 
of that period. In Milton's day, most of the Cantabrigians, 
Crashaw, Joseph Beaumont, Thomas Robinson, and others, 
wrote more or less in their manner. In his boyhood Milton 
was enlisted in the School of the Fletchers and their influence 
is traceable even in his mature poems. Any study of Spen- 
serian material in Milton, then, should include an elaborate 
examination of the work of the School of the Fletchers. As 
the reader follows my elaborate analysis of these old poets he may 
well criticise me for rummaging in the dustiest rooms of the 
storehouse of poetry. But if his patience carries him to the dis- 
cussion of Milton himself he will see that an investigation of 
what we may call the immediate poetic environs of Milton throws 
an interesting light on the work of the great poet without in the 
least besmirching it. 

THE SCHOOL OF THE FLETCHERS 

In 1603, in Sorrowe's Joy, a book of elegies on Queen 
Elizabeth, Giles and Phineas Fletcher made their first un- 
obtrusive appearance in print by joining the group of poets who 
filled this volume with starched lamentations over their adored 
Eliza. The contribution of Phineas, the elder and more prolific, 
is significant as a much more elaborate stanzaic experiment than 
that of his brother. And throughout his many poems Phineas 
is notable for playing a considerable number of variations on 
the Spenserian stanza.^ Giles chose to imitate his master simply 
by taking the rhyme-royal ready-made and by adding an alex- 
andrine. To this measure he remained faithful in his master- 



6 An enumeration of Fletcher's experiments may be worth while: 
ababahccC, ababcC, ahahB, ahahhccC, ahaahhccC, ahahhaaccC, aaaabbB, 
ababbcC (a stanza used by Milton in certain early poems which show the 
influence of the Fletchers), ababccc, abababcC, ababbcC (with all the &'s 
feminine rhymes), abbaabcacC, aaAbbBccC etc., ababccC. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 315 

piece. Significant, too, is the fact that the younger poet's A 
Canto upon the Death of Eliza, though very boyish, shows far 
more promise than Phineas Fletcher's On the Death of Queen 
Elizabeth, The younger brother was the first to publish his 
ambitious masterpiece, greater than anything Phineas ever did. 
With its rapturous close his inspiration seems to have flickered 
out. The gentle, fluent muse of the elder poet was with him 
throughout the leisurely course of his whole life.''' 

Phineas Fletcher 

Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650) served his apprenticeship in 
that green-sickness of love which distressed young Colin Clout. 
Various love-lyrics, now ardent, now bitter, now cynical, all 
bearing the stamp of extreme youth, establish this. He came 
into the more ample and pure air of the best sonnets of the 
Amoretti and the Epithalamion as is evidenced by To My Onely 
Chosen Valentine and Wife and a Hymefi in close imitation of 
Spenser's marriage-hymn. Finally he bid regretful farewell to 



7 Text-books usually assert that Giles Fletcher made his stanza by 
dropping the seventh line of Spenser's stanza (al)abbc[b]cC) , thus, 
perhaps, shirking the demands of a diflfieult extra rhyme. Similarly many 
critics, from Edward Phillips to Lowell, give us an impossible description 
of the Spenserian stanza in the making — an awkward and elaborate shift- 
ing of lines in the ottava rima. The psychology of the whole matter is far 
more obvious. Spenser found a solid structure in the ababbcbc stanza, 
used somewhat by Chaucer and more freely by the fifteenth century poets. 
Whether or not there had been a suggestive and more than sporadic use 
of the alexandrine in some of the poetry which Higgins contributed to 
The Mirror for Magistrates, as Professor Morton argues, it was Spenser 
who first began any elaborate experimentation with this long line as a 
regular part of an elaborate stanza composed mainly of shorter verses. 
As early as the days of The Shepheards Calendar we find him testing the 
value of the alexandrine as the first line of an elaborate stanza employed 
in his elegy to Dido {November). He made occasional use of it as the 
final line of his own peculiar sonnet-form. (See the Amoretti, nos. 10 and 
45, and, among those prefixed to The Faerie Queene: To the Earl of 
Ormond, To Lord Grey, To Ealeigh, To the Countess of Pembroke, and To 
all the gratious and beautifull Ladies in the Court.) He used it for the 
refrain of each stanza in the Epithalamion. All that the Spenserian 
stanza is, then, is the ababbcbc form with an alexandrine added. This 
is all familiar enough to many, but the frequent errors in text-books 
seem to make a clear statement necessary here. Now the method of 
the Fletchers was simply to take, as Spenser did, a current stanza form, 
the rhyme-royal, the ottava rima, the ababcc stanza, and add a final 
alexandrine. 



316 University of California Puhlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

the little pipe that sang of the seductions of "Norfolk maids 
and Ida Crue" after a long struggle, which is duly set forth 
in one of his Piscatorie Eglogs. None of these more subjective 
poems are of particular interest to us in this study. We may 
fairly begin with Fletcher's earliest printed religious poem, The 
Appolyonists, published in 1627. 

The Locusts or Appolyonists is practically a free paraphrase 
and expansion of Phineas Fletcher's Latin poem, the Locustae, 
into English stanzas made in imitation of Spenser by an addition 
of a final alexandrine to the regular oitava rima. Fletcher's 
utter extravagance, relieved now and again by flashes of vivid 
power, is more adequately represented in the turbulent rhetoric 
of the Latin verses, especially in the magnificent speech made 
by Satan to his cohorts in Hell, the fierce scorn of which was 
certainly an inspiration to Milton. But the English expansion 
is naturally more Spenserian and falls more definitely within 
our province. The allegorical description of Sin is compounded 
of Spenser's Errour and Duessa, and stands midway between the 
allegories of The Faerie Queene and of Paradise Lost. 

In the first canto of Fletcher's poem Hell's pursuivants come 
with dreadful noise to their domain where the gates are opened 
by friends below. The porter is Sin, shapeless, foul, deformed, 
"of that first woman and tli' old serpent bred." Yet to some 
she appears beautiful and Fletcher, tempted in true Spenserian 
fashion to dilate on the deceitful loveliness of Sin, gives a 
sensuous description of her allurements. Despair (a woman, 
but very similar to Spenser's male figure), sits close by Sin. 
In the entrance dwell also Sickness, Languor, Horror, and other 
figures similar to those whom Llammon showed to Spenser's 
Sir Guyon before the mouth of Hell and similar to those in 
Milton's In Quintum Novemhris, a poem which might be re- 
garded in some respects as a youthful study for his Paradise 
Lost. Fletcher then tells us how Satan rises to deliver a fiery 
speech. Earth is smiling in peace. Superstition and Ignorance 
fly before Truth and Religion. England especially flourishes. 
Virginia, which belonged to us, is lost. Arm yourselves against 
Earth. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 317 

' ' Dare we with Heaven and not with Earth to fight ? ' ' 

Tumult reigns in the council. Equivocus, a prototype of Mil- 
ton's wily Belial, rises to speak. Fletcher's readers are fairly 
launched by this crafty demon's speech into a review of con- 
temporary events. We read a violent attack on the Catholic 
Church w^hich evidently owes quite as much to the first book of 
The Faerie Queene as to Fletcher's own animus. Spenser's 
allegorical vituperation — Duessa, or Falsehood and Catholicism, 
who leads Holiness away from his love Una, or Truth, to the 
House of Pride where dwell the Seven Deadly Sins; Kirkrapine, 
the villain who stalks through the forest to the squalid abode 
where he lives in lust with Abessa, or Superstition, the daughter 
of Blind Devotion; the giant Orgoglio, who stands for the 
worldly pride of a corrupt church in temporal power, paramour 
of Duessa whom he clothes in scarlet and mounts on a mis- 
shapen beast like the Whore of Babylon — all this distempered 
fancy fires Fletcher in his intemperate abuse. Equivoeus laments 
the unmasking of the Church of Rome w^hich is described, as 
Spenser describes Duessa stripped of her false beauty, in foul 
language that follows Spenser almost verbatim.^ When lustful 
Rome w^as stripped of her scarlet ornaments, says Equivoeus, 
then her friends fell away from her. Who helped the demons 
then to make her seem fair again? The Jesuits. Let us employ 
their aid once more. Let us rush to arms and England will fall. 

"With that the bold blacke Spirit invades the Day, 
And Heav'n and Light and Lord of both defies. 
All Hell run out and sooty flags display, 
A foul deformed rout. ' ' 

Most of the evil spirits scatter through Russia, Greece, Spain, 
and elsewhere. Alone Equivoeus goes to Rome. 

"There that stale purple whore in glorious maske 
Of holy Mother Church he mumming spies, 
Dismounting from her seven-headed beast 
Inviting all with her bare painted breast 
They suck, steep, swell, and burst with that envenom 'd feast. ' '9 



8 Fletcher, canto 1, st. 29. Compare Spenser, bk. 1, e. 8, sts. 45 sq. 

9 Cf . Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1, 7, 16-17: 



318 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

The good fishers of Jordan, now enjoying Heaven's bliss, are 
supplanted by a crew of idle rascals. For them a great Fisher 
builds a Babel to Heaven, enlarges his seas and subjects. His 
tower walls, which are described like Spenser's House of Pride, 
''seeme porphyr faire" but are really "base lome."^" The 
portal seems far off ; the lights are false. There sits dull Ignor- 
ance, a loathly dame." Beside her sit her two children: he, 
called Errour, begot by Hate of Truth, she, called Superstition, 
falsely called Devotion.^- These two store the world with an 
incestuous brood. The usher of the vast hall is loosest Liberty, 
its waiters Lusts, its caterer Vain Expense, its bedmakers Ease, 
Sloth, and soft, wanton Sense, its steward Gluttonie, its high- 
chamberlain perfumed Lechery, like the creatures who wait upon 
Pride in The Faerie Queene}^ Equivocus poisons the Pope's 
mind. Plots are laid, among which the worst is that of Guy 
Fawkes who has been nursed by Rome jon wolfish milk. But 
God, always watchful, calls an eagle to warn the council at 
London. Fawkes is seized and Rome and Spain lament. The 
poem ends with an apostrophe and prayer to God. 

From The Purple Island Fletcher still claims some honor and 
something not unlike notoriety. One is forced to admire, if with 
a smile, the astounding ingenuity with which Fletcher con- 
structed allegorical poetry, almost always clever, sometimes of 
rare beauty, out of the physiology of the human body. As his 



"From that day forth Duessa was his [Orgoglio's] deare, 
And highly honourd in his haughty eye: 
He gave her gold and purple pall to weare, ' ' 
and a monstrous beast, more terrible than the Hydra, 

"For seven great heads out of his body grew," 
to ride upon. Compare also the brood of Errour {The Faerie Queene, 1, 1, 
25-26), who suck the venom of their dead mother till they burst. 

10 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 1, 4, 4-5: 

"A stately Pallace built of squared brieke, 
Which cunningly was without mortar laid, 
Whose wals were high, but nothing strong nor thick 
And golden foile all over them displaid. ' ' 

11 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 1, 8, 30 sq., Ignaro, porter of Orgoglio's castle, 
a childish old man. 

12 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 1, 3, 18, ' ' Abessa, daughter of Corceca slow, ' ' 
that is. Superstition, daughter of Blind Devotion. 

13 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 1-4, passim, but particularly sts. 43 sq. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 319 

point of departure in The Apollyonists was mainly from the 
first book of The Faerie Queene, here the description of the 
Castle of Alma (the soul), in the second book of the same poem, 
was doubtless Fletcher's most influential source. In the ninth 
canto Spenser allegorized the human body, which is the House 
of Alma, more elaborately than one can endure without a laugh. 
The bulwarks of the House of Alma are the five senses. Its 
cook. Concoction, and his abode, the stomach, are described with 
a fidelity which one could well wish less conscientious. In a 
tower of Alma's castle dwell Fancy, IVIemory, and Common- 
Sense, a conceit which we shall find Fletcher unblushingly imitat- 
ing in great detail when it falls to his lot to describe the human 
head. The attacks of a motley crew of Vices on the bulwarks 
of sense gave Fletcher a suggestion for his marshalling and battle 
of the Virtues and Vices. Spenser's imitator, lost in his fetish- 
worship, multiplied details and made a complete reductio ad 
absurdum of his master's allegory. But Fletcher's poem is not 
a mere slavish imitation or merely an ingenious expansion of the 
episode in The Faerie Queene. Its exuberant stanzas abound in 
splendid and original bursts that make one feel querulous with 
Time who denies their enjoyment to all but a few patient 
students of seventeenth century literature. In The Apollyonists 
Fletcher left the shadow of his teacher to limn with bold strokes 
an imposing and noble picture of the rebel Lucifer and his 
hosts. In The Purple Island his legions of Virtues and Vices are 
sometimes strikingly independent of many possible models in 
The Faerie Queene. As an example of Fletcher's own fancy, 
tinged only with the general quality of the Spenserian pictures, 
we may anticipate by quoting the artificial but beautiful lines 
which describe Tapinus or Humility : 

"Next Tapinus, whose sweet, though lowly grace 
All other higher than himself esteem 'd; 
He himself priz'd things as mean and base, 
Which yet in others great and glorious seem 'd 
All ill due debt, good undeserv'd he thought; 
His heart a low-rooft house, but sweetly wrought 
Where God Himself would dwell, though he it dearly bought. 



320 University of California PuMications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

"So choicest drugs in meanest shrubs are found; 
So precious gold in deepest centre dwells; 
So sweetest violets trail on lowly ground; 
So richest pearls ly clos'd in vilest shells; 
So lowest dales we let at highest rates; 
So creeping strawberries yield daintiest cates 
The Highest highly loves the low, the loftie hates." 

It is Senser's cloth-of-gold sown more stiff with extravagant 

fancies and antitheses, but it has its own quaint charm. 

The Purple Island begins with a concourse of shepherds who 
enduce Thirsil, after some difficulty, to sing. To Christ, the 
great prince of shepherds, he gives lofty praise and then speaks 
of God's creation of man. God took purple dust and made "the 
little Isle of man or Purple Island." 

Forthwith we find ourselves lost in a most astounding museum 
of fanc5^ The general fabric of this island is of bone, gristle, 
and flesh which is described as a curious stuff like undivided 
brick, soft, yet durable and concealing the rougher frame. The 
veins are a thousand brooks in azure channels. The whole isle 
has three kingdoms ruled by the liver, heart, and brain. The 
mouth is a cave with twice sixteen porters^* and the tongue, "a 
groom with wondrous volubilitie. "^^ An astounding journey 
over the road of the alimentary canal brings us to where 
"Below dwells in this Citie's market-place 
The Island's common cook, Concoction. "is 

Having been educated conscientiously in all the functions of the 
stomach we are conducted to the kingdom of Hepar, the liver, 
where the steward of the whole isle is placed. So the poet, with a 
desperately grave face, guides us through the realms of the heart 
until, with the allegori2dng of the head, we find him pillaging 



14 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 2, 9, 26: 

"And round about the porch on every syde 
Twise sixteen warders satt, all armed bright." 

15 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 2, 9, 25: 

"Within the barbican a porter sate, 
Day and night keeping watch and ward; 
His larumbell might lowd and wyde be hard, 
When cause requyrd. ' ' 

16 Cf . The Faerie Queene, 2, 9, 31 : 

' ' The maister cooke was cald Concoction. ' ' 
For further parallels see: The Purple Island, 3, 36; The Faerie Queene, 
2, 9, 30 sq., and The Purple Island, 3, 43. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 321 

almost entire stanzas from the description of the House of Alma. 
In the head dwell the counsellors of Intellect, the Lord of the 
Isle. The five lesser counsellors are the Five Senses. The three 
privy counsellors are, as in the House of Alma, Common-Sense, 
Phantastes, and Eumnestes. Common-Sense, 
"Of middle years and seemly personage 
Father of laws, the rule of wrong and right, "i^ 

dwells in the midst of the high tower. 

' ' Not those seven Sages might him parallel, 
Nor he whom Pythian maid did whilome tell 
To be the wisest man that on our earth did dwell, "is 

Phantastes is "The next that in the castle's front is plac't. " 
" .... His yeares are fresh and green. 
His visage old, his face too much def ac 't 
With ashes pale, his eyes deep sunken been. "i9 

The third is Eumnestes, father of memory, very old, worn of 
body but fresh of mind :-° 



17 In The Faerie Queene, 2, 9, 53, the wall of Common-Sense's room has 
pictures ' ' of magistrates, of courts, of tribunals. ' ' 

18 Compare Spenser's general description of the three (st. 48): 

' ' Not he, whom Greece, the nourse of all good arts. 
By Phaebus doome, the wisest thought alive. 
Might be compar'd to these by many parts." 

19 The Faerie Queene, St. 52: 

"Emongst them all sate he which wonned there, 

That hight Phantastes by his nature trew, 

A man of yeares yet fresh, as mote appear 

Of swarth complexion and of crabbed hew, 

That him full of melancholy did shew. 

Bent, hollow beetle browes, sharpe staring eyes." 
In The Furple Island, Phantastes has "Often thoughts and never slakt 
intention." In The Faerie Queene, he "never idle was ne once would rest 
a whit. ' ' In The Furple Island, through his brain 

"Thousand thin forms, and idle fancies flit; 



Which in the world had never being yet." 
In The Faerie Queene his chamber is painted with 
"Infinite shapes of things dispersed then 
Some such as in the world were never yit 

Such as in idle fantasies doe flit." 
20 Cf. Spenser's Eumnestes, st. 55: 

"And therein sat an old, old man halfe blind 
And all decrepit in his feeble corse, 
Yet lively vigour rested in his mind." 
And cf. The Purple Island, st. 50: 

"Therefore his body weak his eyes halfe blinde. 
But minde, more fresh and strong; — ah better fate! 



322 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

"Well he recalls Nimrods first tyrrannie 
And Babel's pride daring the loftie skie;"2i 

Like his body is his chamber: 

"And as his carcase, so his house declin'd; 
Yet were the walls of firm and able state; 



Onely on him a nimble page attends 
Who when in ought the aged Grandsire sends, 
With swift, yet backward steps his helping aidance lends. ' '22 

The island's queen is Voletta, the Will, more beautiful than 
Gloriana, but often caught in the toils of vice and thereby caus- 
ing her husband, Intellect, sad wars and misfortunes. Synteresis, 
Conscience, is her faithful counsellor. When Voletta disregards 
this attendant's warnings, a "sad-fair maid Repentance" holds 
her fainting. Just now she is prostrated with grief over a recent 
error and the Vices are marshalling, inspired with a new hope of 
razing the Castle of Intellect. 

In this latter part of the poem, in which the Vices and 
Virtues gather and hold battle, Fletcher departs somewhat more 
freely from the influence of Spenser. But it is evident that 
Fletcher used the denizens of the House of Pride to some extent 
and found material elsewhere in The Faerie Queene for other 
Vices. Thus Caro, the Flesh, is another one of his morbid 
imitations of Duessa unmasked. But when the last jeer has been 
east by the painful seeker of parallel passages, one can but 
admire the bold strokes of originality that flash out capriciously 



21 Cf. The Faerie Queene, st. 56: 

"The warres he well remembred of King Nine, 
Of old Assaracus, and Inachus divine." 

22 Cf . The Faerie Queene, st. 55 : 

' ' The chamber seemed ruinous and old. 



Yet were the wals, that did the same uphold, 

Eight firm and strong. ' ' 
And St. 58: 

"A little boy did on him still attend, 

To reach, whenever he for ought did send. ' ' 
Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority 
(1657), an anonymous comedy, may be mentioned here in passing as using 
the same allegorical material as that in Spenser's House of Alma and 
certainly deriving as much from Spenser as from Phineas Fletcher. But 
the work is of no importance for this study. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 323 

in many places. Parthenia (Chastity in the single life), is, to 
be sure, derived from Spenser's Belphoebe and Britomart. But 
Spenser himself would have admired these lines : 
' ' Her armour seem 'd a goodly garden green, 

Where thousand spotless lilies freshly blew; 

And on her shield the 'lone bird might be seen, 

The Arabian bird, shining in colours new; 

Itself unto itself was onely mate; 

Ever the same, but new in newer date; 
And underneath was writ, ' Such is chaste single state. ' 

' ' Thus hid in arms, she seem 'd a goodly knight. 
And fit for any warlike exercise; 
And when she list lay down her armour bright. 
And back resume her peaceful maiden's guize; 
The fairest maid she was, that ever yet. 
Prison 'd her locks within a golden net. 
Or let them waving hang, with roses fair beset." 

It is unnecessary to illustrate Fletcher's methods by a further 
enumeration of these personages. The ensuing battle is managed 
with nice allegorical but rather doubtful moral propriety. First 
Parthenia jousts with Porneios (Fornication), and overthrows 
him. Aselges (Lasciviousness), is bent on revenge but falls 
before the warlike maid. Other rascals swarm around her but 
she defends herself valiantly till the Old Dragon sends False 
Delight, in friendly attire, who wounds her in the side. Agneia 
(Chastity in married life), and her husband Eucrates (Temper- 
ance), ride to her rescue. Soon there is a general melee in which 
Fletcher's allegory works with the preciseness of a machine. It 
is a rare puppet show, like the first part of the battle of Ron- 
eesvalles in the Chatison. Often the Vices pretend to yield and 
then wound their conquerors treacherously. When the Virtues 
have almost won the field the Old Dragon suddenly marshals 
a new loathsome crew: Hamartia (Sin), Despair, like a dead 
man, with a raven on his crest, armed with ropes and knives,^^ 
Time, and Death. They work havoc, though Faith, Experience, 
and Hope rally the drooping Virtues. Suddenly an Angel with 



23 Cf. Spenser's Despair, 1, 9, whose hollow eyes look deadly dull. A 
ghastly owl perches on his cave. He tempts his victims to suicide with 
ropes and knives. 



324 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

a silver trumpet drops into their midst. The Old Dragon knows 
his doom but rushes fiercely against his foe in blinding arms. 
He is wounded and bound. Now is the time of festival. Ecleeta, 
long widowed, welcomes her bridegroom, Christ, who is described 
with all the pagan rapture of the Canticles, or as an Italian poet 
of the Renaissance would limn an Adonis : 

"His locks like raven's plumes, or shining jet 
Falls down in curls along his ivory neck; 
Within their circlets hundred Graces set, 
And with love-knots their comely hangings deck: 
His mighty shoulders, like that giant swain, 
All heav'n and earth, and all in both sustain; 
Yet knows no weariness, nor feels oppressing pain. ' ' 

We are left not quite certain whether w^e ought to regard 
Fletcher as a charlatan or as a true poet. It would be impossible 
to give space to a complete enumeration of Fletcher's echoes. 
There are many formal tricks, too, which the zealous pupil is no 
less assiduous in reproducing. We have seen that Fletcher is 
indefatigable in his experiments with variations of the Spen- 
serian stanza. But he never tries the more difficult stanza itself. 
And a study of his use of the alexandrine, a dangerous line for 
English poets, does not add much to our faith in him. Various 
cheap and easy devices, violent antitheses, elaborate play on 
words, are made use of to make the final lines prominent.^* For 



24 For example: 

' ' Whereof three noble are, and thinne, three thick and vile. ' ' 
"All day he rent receives; returns it all the day." 
"Whose death she all too late, too soon, too much repented." 
' ' To give an end to grief e till endless griefs did end her. ' ' 
"So spring some dawns of joy, so sits the night of sorrow." 
"Poorly — poore man — he liv'd; poorly — poore man — he di'd. " 

Other members of the School of the Fletchers resort to the same device. 

Here are a few examples taken at random from hundreds equally typical. 
' ' How worthily he died, that died unworthily. ' ' 
"That bloody man to save, man's Saviour shed his blood." ■ 
' ' Enjoying but one joy — but one of all joyes best. ' ' 
' ' That all might come to see, and all might see that came. ' ' 

— Giles Fletcher. 
"So fast to spend the time that spends your time so fast." 
"And fit love to reward, and with love be rewarded." 
' ' Thou wilt not love to live, unless thou live to love. ' ' 

— Brittain's Ida. 
"How sorrowe, joye, and joye again did sorrowe close." 

— Thomas Robinson. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 325 

Fletcher had learned from his master that each alexandrine in 
a perfect stanza must be memorable to bring about the supreme 
close. But he did not, like Spenser, have an inexhaustible 
treasury of fancy and sensuous music to draw from. The School 
of the Fletchers indulged too often in alexandrines both rhetorical 
and halting. Almost invariably a very heavy caesura, in the 
middle of the line, divides it unpleasantly and destroys the rich 
flow. But Fletcher can, on occasion, display real imagination 
and write verses heavy with rich music. And he is a poet of 
distinct merit when he is bearing the torch for Milton as he 
conceives his gloomy and majestic picture of Satan. Most un- 
erringly is he a poet when he sings, with no small share of his 
master's gentle sensuousness, of Tapinus and Parthenia. 

Giles Fletcher 

It is probable that Phineas Fletcher was at work on his 
Purple Island at the same time that Giles was singing of Christs 
Victorie and Triumph in Heaven, and Earth, over, and after 
Death. Both poets borrowed freely from each other and in- 
dulged in considerable mutual praise.^^ There is, indeed, a 
reference at the close of the Christ to the last episode in The 
Purple Island, the marriage of Christ and Eclecta : 



"So I my best beloved's am; as he is mine." 

— Francis Quarles. 
Of course Spenser is not entirely innocent of such devices; e.g., The 
Faerie Queene, 1, 9, 9: 

"Which still wex old in woe, whiles woe still wexeth new." 
But Spenser's lapses of this sort are remarkably few considering the 
immense demands of his huge poem on his metrical resources and the 
many artificial excesses of his time. 

25 Space will not permit a detailed account of this. For an example of 
verbal similarity, compare Giles Fletcher: 

' ' How may a worme, that crawls along the dust 
Clamber the azure mountaines thrown so high," 
and Phineas Fletcher: 

"How shall a worm, on dust that crawls and feeds 
Climb to th' empyreall court, where these States reign?" 
Both poets give an elaborate picture of the debate of Justice and Mercy 
over mankind before God which abounds in similarities. See also the 
descriptions of Christ in both poets which are almost identical and which 
seem to derive ultimately from The Song of Songs. For Phineas Fletcher's 
eulogy of his brother see Preliminary Verses for Giles Fletcher's Christ. 
Giles Fletcher's panegyrical rejoinder is noted in the text below: 



326 University of California Puhlications in Modern FhiloJogy. [Vol. 2 

"But my greene Muse, hiding her younger head 
Under old Chamus' flaggy banks, .... 

Dares not those high amours and love-sick songs assay. ' ' 
Giles Fletcher, we see, was not a love-poet despite his sensuous 
picture of the bower of Vaine-Delight. Though his one im- 
portant poem was published in 1610, perhaps before his brother 
had bidden farewell to the little pipe which emulated the youth- 
ful love-plaints of Colin, he is austere sometimes to the point of 
asceticism. He has a vatic fervor that places the Christ among 
the greatest religious poems of the period. 

The Christ begins with a notle and impressive allegory of 
the debate of Justice and Mercy before God. Justice has the 
winged lightning for her Mercury. About her throng pale 
Sickness, "with kercher'd head," Famine, bloodless Care, Age, 
Fear, and many more. Justice leans her bosom on two stony 
tables. Her speech inflames the Heavenly Hierarchies to destroy 
corrupted mankind. But Mercy steps forward like the sun from 
the clouds. Upon her breast sleeps Delight. She pleads for 
man, especially since Christ is now wandering on earth ; and her 
efforts are successful. 

On earth Christ is dwelling in the wilderness. Satan comes 
as an aged hermit, just as Archimago comes to the Red Cross 
Knight in The Faerie Qneene. Under pretence of leading Christ 
to his hermitage, Satan leads him to the bower of Despair and 
we come to Fletcher's superb borrowing from The Faerie 
Queene, his most important imitation. Headly condemned this 
passage as "a curious instance of plagiarism." Grosart, the 
Fletchers' militant champion, protests angrily with some of his 
characteristic rhetoric: "Who but a man with nose for 'plagiar- 
ism' as eager-nostrilled as that of your orthodox hunter after 
' heresy ' will deem these of any moment. ' '-" He asserts that two 
lines were intended as a quotation. But many lines which 
Grosart chooses to ignore are lifted almost bodily out of Spenser. 



26 Grosart, burning with zeal to establish the striking originality of the 
Fletchers, overlooks the numerous parallels I am noting, but cites scores of 
passages to prove Milton's indebtedness to the Fletchers that would puzzle 
even the ' ' eager-nostrilled ' ' Headly to appreciate. 



1912] Cory : Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 327 

My own notion is that the whole quarrel is futile and that, 
although Fletcher's indebtedness amounts to liberal borrowing, 
he has created a picture which is hardly less impressive after 
we know its source. Christ comes to the baleful bower, 
" .... The mouth of that infernal! cave, 
That gaping stood, all commers to devoure. " 

About the den are venomous herbs and ' ' ragged trees. ' '- ' Every- 
where 

"Dead bones and skulls were cast and bodies hanged wear. "28 
Here dwells Despair. 

"His black uncombed lockes dishevelled fell 
About his face; through which, as brands of Hell, 
Sunk in his skull, his staring eyes did glowe. 
That made him deadly looke. .... 



His cloathes were ragged clouts, with thornes pind fast. ' '29 
Fletcher does not attempt to reproduce Despair's subtle elo- 
quence in The Faerie Queene that nearly ruins the Red Cross 
Knight. Christ steals away and flies with Satan to where 
" .... Presumption her pavilion spread 

Over the temple the bright starres among. ' ' 

Here, too, all temptations prove futile and angels bring the 
Saviour to a mountain-top at first snowy. Here he endures the 
supreme temptation. In the description which follows, a famous 
passage in the Christ, everyone who has read Spenser's mag- 
nificent outburst on the Bower of Bliss will see both the general 
indebtedness and the originality of Fletcher. 



27 Cf. Spenser, 1, 9, 34: 

"And all about old stocks and stubs of trees 
Whereon nor fruite nor leaf was ever seene, 
Did hang upon the ragged rocky knees. ' ' 

28 Cf . The Faerie Queene, 1, 9, 34 : 

"On which had many wretches hanged beene, 
Whose carcases were scattered on the greene. ' ' 
2» The Faerie Queene, st. 35 : 

"His griesie lockes, long growen and unbound, 
Disordered hong about his shoulders round. 
And hid his face; through which his hollow eyne 
Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound ; ' ' 
and St. 36: 

"His garments nought but many ragged clouts. 
With thornes together pind and patched was." 



328 University of California Publicatiowi in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

"All suddenly the hill his snowe devours, 
In lieu whereof a goodly garden grew 
As if the snowe had melted into flow'rs 
Which their sweet breath in subtill vapours threw, 
That all about perfumed spirits flew: 
For what as ever might aggrate the sense, 
In all the world, or please the appetence, 
Here it was poured out in lavish affluence. 

"For in all theseso some one thing most did growe. 
But in this one grew all things else beside; 
For sweet Varietie herselfe did throw 
To every banke; here all the ground she dide 
In lillie white; there pinks emblazed wide; 
And damask 't all the earth; and here shee shed 
Blew violets, and there came roses red; 
And every sight the yielding sense, as captive led. 

' ' The garden like a lady f aire was cut, 
That lay as if she slumber 'd in delight, 
And to the open skies her eyes did shut ; 
The azure fields of heav'n wear 'sembled right 
In a large round, set with the flowr's of light. 
The flow 're-de-luce, and the round sparks of deaw. 
That hung upon the azure leaves, did shew. 
Like twinkling Starrs, that sparkle in th' eavning blew. 

' ' Upon a hillie banke her head shee cast, 
On which the bowre of Vaine-delight was built; 
White and red roses for her face was plac't, 
And for her tresses marigolds wear spilt; 
Them broadly shee displaid, like flaming guilt, 
Till in the ocean the glad day wear drown 'd; 
Then up again her yellow lockes she wound. 
And with greene filletts in their prettie calls them bound." 

The quaint, stiff extravagance with which Fletcher strives to 
outdo his master's gorgeousness is here only delightful. Both 
poets have fountains adorned with naked, wanton boys. Both 
have groves where branches twine in drunken abandon. Both 
Spenser and Fletcher have beds of roses where naked women 
disport. The "faire witch," so called by both poets, has a herd 
of enchanted beasts, once men, in both poems. In Fletcher 



30 Viz : Ida, Tempe, etc., which Fletcher says cannot be compared with 
this garden. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 329 

Ambition, too, sits enthroned. In Spenser Guyon finds a similar 
Ambition sitting in state in Mammon's cave. Christ hears 
someone sing a voluptuous lay like that with which one of 
Acrasia's damsels greets Sir Guyon 's ears: 

"See see the flowers that belowe, 
Now as fresh as morning blowe; 
And of all the Virgin rose, 
Everything doth passe away 
Thear is danger in delay 
Come, come gather then the rose. ' '3i 

Above all Panglorie sits enthroned, crowned with her golden 
hair and a garland of rosebuds. In one hand she holds a silver 
wand; in the other, a hollow globe of glass whose colors, like 
those of the rainbow, are always vanishing. Christ dispels her 
enchantments and she flees to Hell. Angels bring a banquet to 
the Lord. 

From now on Fletcher ceases to employ allegory to any 
extent. The poem gains distinctly in earnest eloquence, greater 
vigor, and nobler simplicity. Christ passes over the Cedron 
singing to his death. 

' ' So downe the silver streames of Eridan, 
On either side bank't with a lilly wall, 
Whiter than both, rides the triumphant swan. 
And sings his dirge and death, and prophesies his fall. ' ' 

The betrayal and crucifixion are described with an eremite's 
ecstasy and with occasional incursions into the realms of 
grotesque horror.^- All earth mourns. But the second dawn is 



31 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 2, 12, sts. 74 sq: 

' ' The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay : 
Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee 

Doth first peepe forth in bashfuU modestie. 
That fairer seemes the less ye see her may, 
Lo! see soone after how more bold and free 
Her bared bosom she doth broad display; 
Lo! see soone after how she fades and falls away. 

' ' Gather therefore the Rose whilst yet is prime 
For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre. ' ' 

'^ The curious may compare the Devil here with Errour in The Faerie 
Queene and the Old Dragon in The Purple Island. 



330 University of California Fiiblications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

an ecstasy of light. The flowers spring hixuriantly to welcome 
their Lord. Triumphant from his harrowing of Hell, Christ 
returns to earth and thence ascends into Heaven. With a real 
rapture the poet visions the splendors of Paradise. He rejoices 
in the love of Egliset for Christ. But he is too humble to sing 
of the great marriage. That is reserved for Thirsil. And with 
this modest note the noble poem closes. 

"Brittain's Ida" 

In 1628 Thomas Walkley published a fanciful version of the 
story of Venus and Anchises called Brittain's Ida, "written by 
that renowned poet Edmond Spencer." Its authorship remained 
unquestioned for nearly two centuries, although it seems incred- 
ible to a student of Spenser that its apocryphal nature should 
have remained so long unnoticed. It is in the stanza of Christ's 
Victorie (ahabhccC), and is either the work of one of the 
Fletchers, more probably of Phineas, or of a member of their 
school. Grosart sought to fix its authorship on Phineas Fletcher 
by the useless and worn-out method of piling up parallels with 
the poet's established works (as if most imitators, especially of 
this period, did not furnish parallels a plenty), and by certain 
more convincing repentant references to the looser poems of 
youth. He has but increased the probability at best. 

The poem is a lovely work of youth, sensual, to be sure, but 
almost too delicate for Phineas Fletcher at any period of his life. 
It is in six brief cantos. The first simply introduces Anchises. 

"In Ida vale (who knows not Ida vale) 
When harmless Troy yet felt not Grecian spite," 

dwelt a hundred shepherds, of whom the most beautiful by far 
was Anchises. Canto two is a description of the Garden of 
Delight, in imitation of Spenser's Bower of Bliss. Here Venus 
dwelt and here Anchises came on a day when he was tired from 
the chase. From the grove came "dainty music." Thither 
half fearful, half hopeful he stole. Some voice sang a lay like 
that which Guyon heard in the Bower of Bliss. Anchises entered 



1912] Cory: Speaser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 331 

and saw Venus reclining on a bed of lillies, clothed in a veil of 
thinnest silk. Anchises swooned. Venus awaking almost 
thought she saw Adonis once more dying at her feet. She 
revived the youth with tender care. By her surpassing beauty 
he knew that she could be no other than the Goddess of Love. 
Ardently he pleaded to be admitted into her service. The 
gracious goddess granted his suit, gave him a bow and arrows, 
and placed him with the pretty Graces from whom he won great 
love. But he nursed a growing passion for Venus in secret until 
one day she overheard his complaints and begged him to tell her 
the cause. Falteringly he disclosed his longing and, begging for 
a single kiss, he won her love. His happiness was long ; but one 
day he rashly disclosed his bliss to woods and heaven and earth : 

"That Jove upon him downe his thunder darted 
Blasting his splendent face, and all his beauty swarted. " 

And here the poet steps in quaintly in his own person, blames 
Anchises for blabbing, and avows his own powers of secrecy 
would his obdurate mistress but yield. The poem shows a close 
dependence on Spenser and a fluent mastery of his sensuous 
cadences, though the rhetorical alexandrine creeps in at times. 
It is a delightful piece of youthful lawlessness. 

Thomas Robinson 

About 1620, Thomas Robinson, who has suffered more 
obscurity than many worse poets of his period, wrote his Life 
and Death of Mary Magdalene in the stanza of Giles Fletcher's 
Christ and enrolled himself in the School of the Fletchers. The 
influence of the Christ, in fact, is quite as marked as that of 
The Faerie Queene. Robinson begins with a quaint paradoxical 
statement of the argument exactly in the manner of Giles 
Fletcher 's prelude : 



332 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

"The death of her that was but newly borne: 
The birth of her that long agoe was dead: 
The life of her whom heaven and earth did scorne: 
Her beawty, that was erst debellished: 
How snowy white inveild the crimson red, 
And yet the lily sprange unto the rose, 
Under his spiny fortresse to repose; 
How sorrowe, joye, and joye againe did sorrowe elose.38 

' ' This be the duty of my oaten reed. ' ' 

"What reader having sped through these astounding lines would 
not hasten on in search of the wonders that the poet promises 
from his humble oaten stops ? 

The narrative begins with an account of the gorgeous Palace 
of Pleasure where dwelt 

"Amorous, younge, faire, slender Aphrodite. 



A goulden bowle in her right hand shee bore. 
Wherein all pleasure and delight were bred,' 



as Panglorie, in the Christ, holds a hollow glass globe which 
symbolizes man's vain pleasures. Two ladies held the train of 
Aphrodite, "Plumpe, pursive Luxury, and quainter Pride." 
Gilded Flattery supported her right hand, Wantonnesse her left. 
"Foolish dame Laughter" painted her eyelids. There too were 
Idleness, Jealousy, Inconstancie, and "a thousand graceless 
Graces." A song, like those always sung in these Bowers of 
Bliss, allured. 

"This said, a thousand prostitute delights, 
Flewe up and downe the courts as bright as day." 

Gluttonie and Bacchus were invited to the feast. After an orgy 
all dispersed into the arbors. Some were turned to beasts. 



33 Cf . the opening stanzas of the Christ : 

"The birth of Him that no beginning knewe. 
Yet gives beginning to all that are borne. 
And how the Infinite farre greater grewe, 
By growing lesse, and how the rising Morne, 
That shot from heav'n, did backe to heav'n retourne; 
The obsequies of Him that could not die 
And death of life, ende of eternitie 
How worthily he died that died unworthily ; ' ' etc. 



1912] Cory : Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 333 

Among the revellers the most beautiful was Mary Magdalene. 
From many rivals she chose the strongest, one who obtained 
her after a bloody contest. They went into a garden of flowers 
like those of Spenser strewed at the feet of Elisa. 

' ' The Damaske-roses heere were brought a bed, 
Just opposite the Lilie of the Vale, 
The woody Primrose and the pretty Paunee 
The Pincke, the Daflfodill and Chevisance 
All in Perfumed sets their fragrant heads advance. "34 

Heaven, beholding, sent Syneide (Good Conscience), daughter 
of light. She went to Mary, admonished her, and wounded her 
with a goad. Mary, however, soon went back to her ways of 
lust. Then Heaven was angered and sent a tormenting Con- 
science, "a dreary hagge," who came with other furies. The 
snakes of Conscience twined around Mary. Sorrow and Care 
ruled her. She was carried to the Cave of Melancholy, Robin- 
son's contribution to the Spenserian Despair-poetry. Near the 
tarn was a steep path leading to Hell. Nemesis hastened thither 
and called up seven fiery spirits to torture Mary, who wandered 
distraught through a great desert. But new hope dawned. 
Christ was approaching. He saw Mary and cast out the evil 
spirits. Syneide returned to the penitent and bade her go to the 
Palace of Wisdom. It was surrounded by rich forests like 
fragrant Lebanon. 

"Pomegranates sweet, and saffron there contend; 
Spiknard and Camphire and browne Cinnamon. ' ' 

Wisdom's palace stands on a hill because her glory is high; 
on a rock because she is constant. Thorns grow before it because 
it is difficult of approach. Though the poet's own glosses refer 



34 Cf. Spenser's Song to Elisa (April). 

' ' Bring hether the pincke and purple ciillambine 

With gelliflowers; 
Bring coronations, and sops in wine, 
Worne of paramoures; 
Strowe me the ground with daffadowndillies, 
And cowslips, and kingcups, and loved lillies; 
The pretie pawnee 
And the chevisaunce 
Shall match with the fayre flowre delice. " 



334 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

throughout to the Wisdom of Solomon, his more substantial 
indebtedness to Spenser's episode of the House of Holinesse is 
unquestionable. As in Spenser, "watchful Humility still kept 
the dore" and brought Mary before beautiful Wisdom. In the 
Apocryphal book the only allegorical element is the vague per- 
sonification of Wisdom. In Robinson's poem IMary was led to 
Repentance, a woman clothed in sackcloth who continually 
weeps. Repentance, in The Faerie Queerie, bathed the Red Cross 
Knight in ' ' salt water smarting sore ' ' after he had been scourged 
by "bitter Penaunce" and "sharpe Remorse." Mary repented 
and was soothed by Conscience, as the Red Cross Knight was 
comforted by Charissa. Robinson's poem closes with an account 
of Mary's devotion to Christ, her lamentation at the cross, and 
her meeting with Christ after the resurrection. 

Francis Quarles 

Francis Quarles (1592-1644) should be noted as member of 
the School of the Fletchers. For Phineas Fletcher he had the 
highest admiration. He prefixed commendatory verses to The 
Purple Island, hailing its author as the "Spencer of this age." 
And he was very partial to the variations of the Spenserian 
stanzas employed by the Fletchers. He added two similar 
variations to the group of stanzas in regular pentameters and 
he experimented further by varying the length of the lines. 
Most of his Spenserian variations appear in Emhlemes and 
Hieroglyphikes of the life of Man, groups of poems in which he 
took a Biblical quotation as a text and either expanded it into 
a poem in the same mood or wrote a sort of homily in verse on 
thoughts suggested by it. Probably he was led to vary Fletcher 's 
stanzas occasionally, by the introduction of some shorter lines, 
from a desire to make his stanzas more suitable to the mood of 
some of his texts. The Emblems seem to have achieved consider- 
able popularity and in fact do contain about all his best work. 
Almost all those which are based on quotations from the Can- 
ticles are at least worthy of the Fletchers and rise above the 
deadly mediocrity of the body of his work. Their content is 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The Scliool of the Fletchers, and Milton. 335 

seldom notably Spenserian, but a few significant verses may be 
noted as containing material at least familiar to Spenser and his 
followers. Thus in one Emblem (Book 5, Emblem 3), on the 
passage in the Canticles (2:5), "Stay me with flowers, and 
comfort me with apples for I am sick with love, ' ' he contributes 
a flower passage and writes in a manner perhaps vaguely 
reminiscent of the Epithalamion. 

"Virgins, tuck up your silken laps and fill ye 
With the fair wealth of Flora's Magazine; 
The purple violet, and the pale-fac'd lilly; 
The pancy and the organ columbine; 
The flowring thyme, the guilt-boul daffadilly; 
The lowly pink, the lofty eglentine; 
The blushing rose, the queen of flowers and best 
Of Flora 's beauty ; but above the rest, 
Let Jesse 's soveraigne flower perfume my qualming breast. ' ' 

Joseph Beaumont 

The illustrious family of Beaumonts furnished their member 
of the School of the Fletchers in the person of Dr. Joseph Beau- 
mont (1615-1699) whose Psyche is the most ponderous of all 
the ambitious allegories of this group. Beaumont was a placid 
dreamer who, however, was shrewd enough to avoid the con- 
tumely of the howling world. Although he was driven from 
Cambridge along with his friend Crashaw and other prominent 
royalists during the troublous times, he contrived to be one who 
suffered no harm thereby. He occupied several snug positions 
as pastor and teacher, and discreetly married the daughter of 
his patron, the Bishop of Ely. His leisure hours were devoted 
to the production of his unwieldy epic. Spenser's mighty 
scheme, propounded in the famous letter to Raleigh, was no more 
heaven-storming. Beaumont linked to the life of Christ an 
elaborate allegory of Psyche, the soul of man. In 1648 he 
published his poem in a version said to have been much milder 
than the one which is now extant. He then devoted himself to 
putting an edge on the sectarian passages and, in calm certainty 
of deathless fame, dauntlessly added four cantos to the leviathan. 



336 University of California Publications in Modern Fhilology. [Vol. 2 

In 1702 his son, prompted, he tells us, by the demand for the 
poem, the first edition of which was even then rare, published 
Psyche, or Love's Mystery, In Tiventy-four Cantos: Displaying 
the Intercourse Betwixt Christ, and the Soul, The Second 
Edition, With Corrections throughout and Four new Cantos, 
never before Printed. 

The Psyche begins with a scene in Hell which may be grouped 
with those of The Apollyonists, Christ's Victorie, and Paradise 
Lost. "With a speech of fiery scorn Satan fills his henchmen with 
a new spirit of rebellion and lays plots to beguile Psyche. Lust 
is first despatched against the unsuspecting maiden. She is 
found feasting with Phylax, the emissary of Christ, who pre- 
pares her for her coming danger by a detailed account of 
Joseph's life and his temptation by Potiphar's wife. Psyche slips 
out alone, but sage Syneidesis (Conscience), follows. Charis, 
an old friend, is also on the watch but decides to let Psyche have 
a severe lesson. Syneidesis falls asleep and Psyche, pursued by 
a boar, is rescued by a gallant knight, Aphrodisius. Her rescuer, 
however, proves to be the seductive emissary of Satan who would 
have ruined her with his lying tongue had not Charis and 
Phylax intervened. Aphrodisius is bound, and when repentant 
Psyche is brought back to behold evil unmasked he proves to be 
a hideous fiend. 

Beaumont now describes a rebellion which is in the manner 
of Spenser's episode of the House of Alma and Phineas 
Fletcher's Purple Island. Psyche's friends murmur against her 
and meet in an upper chamber of the house whose master is 
Common-Sense. The maidens Opsis (Sight), Ophresis (Smell), 
Geusis (Taste), Acoe (Hearing), and Haphe (Touching), all 
dispute for the supremacy. Opsis begins by describing the 
wonders of her house in terms of physiological allegory precisely 
similar to the manner of Phineas Fletcher. She then shows 
exterior glories, a pageant of the seasons. Here Beaumont 
derives hints from an analogous scene in the fragmentary 
seventh book of The Faerie Queene. First : 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 337 

' ' The Spring marched forth array 'd 
With fragrant Green, whose sweet embroidery 
In blooms and buds of Virgin smiles display 'd 
A scene of living joys all echoed by 
Ten thousand Birds, which, perch 'd on every Tree 
Tun'd their soft pipes to Nature's harmony. "35 

In the same manner each Sense puts forth her claim, first by 
physiological allegory, then by presenting a spectacle of the 
external wonders which she enjoys. The vision which Acoe dis- 
plays is of .special interest because of its elaborate account of 
Beaumont's most cherished poets. A grove suddenly springs up. 
Here Pindar and Flaccus play rival notes. Homer sits on a 
mountain and IMaro echoes his princely voice with tones of 
equal quality. In slightly lower state admirable Tasso rests, 

"Not far from whom, though in a lower clime 
Yet with a goodly train doth Colin sweep : 
Though manacled in thick and peevish Ehymes 
A decent pace his paineful Verse doth keep; 
Eight fairly dress 'd were his welf eatured Queen 
Did not her Mask too much her beauties screen. ' ' 

Common-Sense quiets the brawling Senses and advises them 
to send his sister Fancy to the discontented troop scattered about 
the Heart. Fancy flies to the Passions and exhorts them to 
insurrection. They march in array. Psyche, terrified, flees to 
her inmost fort and sends Logos (Reason), to urge peace. But 
her advice is spurned and he is imprisoned. Phylax and Charis 
are nowhere to be seen. Only Thelema (Will), is left. She sallies 
forth in vengeful mood, but the Passions, by fawning homage 
and by deceit, lure her to their side. The Passions then send 
Love, their most subtle champion, to treat with Psyche. He 
wins her over to their lawlessness. Pride arranges Psyche in 
gorgeous apparel and the unhappy maid revels and rides far and 



35 Cf . The Faerie Queene, 7, 7, 28 : 

"First lusty Spring, all dight in leaves of flowres 
That freshly budded and new bloosmes did beare 
(In which a thousand birds had built their bowres, 
That sweetly sung, to call forth paramours.) " 
Beaumont's descriptions of the other seasons are also very similar to 
Spenser 's. 



338 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

wide in a coach of vanities. Syneidesis protests but Psyche 
shrouds her in a black veil. 

From Heaven Christ sees his bride's fall and despatches 
Phylax and Charis to her aid. Phylax stops her chariot in its 
mad course. Angry Thelema, the postillion, would drive on, but 
Phylax shatters the car and chides both Thelema and the more 
reluctant Psyche to repentance. Pride is shown in Hell and the 
other passions are glad to submit to Thelema 's stern orders. 
Logos and Syneidesis are freed. Psyche is instructed by the 
story of Adam and Eve and by a long account of the life of 
Christ, freely interspersed with allegory, which covers nine 
cantos. 

It seems quite reasonable for Phylax to have supposed that, 
after his extraordinary biography of Christ, intellectual exhaus- 
tion alone would have so completely subdued Psyche's moods 
for unhealthy explorations that she would present in effect an 
adamantine front to sin. But as soon as he leaves her the busy 
devil seeks out "a special Fury's den" and despatches the 
monster against his victim. In short. Psyche is tempted by 
Heresy and is won over. But Phylax once more intervenes and 
takes her to her new-found Doctor's tower, to the birthplace of 
Heretick Sin, where they find 

"Swarms of Doors and Cells and Galleries, 
Which by quaint Turnings to and fro did wind. ' ' 

They come to a room where 

"A goodly Crucifix was there displaid, 
Altars were rear'd and reverend Bibles ope, 
By which majestick Liturgies were laid, 
And lofty-tuned Anthems; on the top 
Art plac'd a quire of Angels hovering 
And made the gorgeous Eoof all seem to sing." 

But at the entrance of Phylax all the falsity becomes apparent. 

"Glozing Deceits and handsome Lyes stood there, 
With gentle meek demure Hypocrisy, 
All which in goodly state attended were 
By treacherous Ehetorick and Phylosophy; 
With Syllogisms in rank and file array 'd 
Whose hands three-forked massy halberts sway'd. " 



1912] Cory : Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 339 

No doubt the unruly Psyche needed even more persuasion than 
could come from the disconcerting spectacle of syllogisms in 
human semblance. So she was shown a long procession of the 
heretical sects of all ages pressing downward to Death's living 
fountains. 

Beaumont now contributes to the allegorical purgation scenes 
which Spenser made popular in this age by his description of the 
penance of the Red Cross Knight in the House of Holinesse. 
Phylax carries Psyche a fabulous height in his chariot. She is 
brought to a majestic palace. To enter its first gate she is com- 
pelled to bend and shrink. This portal, of transparent crystal, 
is kept by Sorrow mourning with dishevelled hair and scourging 
herself continually. After beholding many wonders Psyche is 
brought before the Queen of the Castle, Ecclesia, the Church 
and the supreme bride of Christ. In her right hand the stately 
queen holds the golden key of the Port of Bliss and in her left 
the iron key which opens the way down to torment. Her maids 
of honor swarm about her: the sober matron Sanctity, portly 
Magnanimity with open swelling breasts,^*' and other Spenserian 
figures. By Truth's embraces Psyche is made whole.^'^ 

After one more vain attempt Satan resorts to a supreme trial. 

"Thus came the monster to his dearest Place 
On Earth, a Palace wondrous large and high, 
Which on seav'n Mountains' heads enthroned was. 

Here our fantastic poet attacks religious persecution in the 
manner of Phineas Fletcher's onslaught on Catholicism in The 
Appolyonists and even more closely in imitation of Spenser's 
House of Pride. The exterior walls are of dead men's bones 
surrounded by a ditch filled with innocent blood.^*^ Satan finds 



36 Compare Charity in the House of Holinesse, The Faerie Queene, 1, 

10. 30. , . , 

37 Compare Una (Truth), who is reinstated once more as the accepted 
lover of the Eed Cross Knight after his penance, and Browne's Aletheia (in 
Britannia's Pastorals), who embraces Riot after his conversion following 
a similar repentance. 

38 Compare The Faerie Queene, 1, 4, 36. The Sins ride forth from the 
House of Pride. 

"And underneath their feet all scattered lay 
Dead sculls and bones of men whose life had gone astray." 



340 University of Calif orjiia Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

the castle's queen, Persecution, and embraces her with great 
joy. She promises to proclaim pardon to all who will repent 
Christianity and come to her. Her departure with her hosts is 
described in close imitation of Spenser's great pageant of the 
Seven Deadly Sins. It is the first Spenserian attempt to re- 
produce the master's great picture of his abstractions of evil in 
motley procession, mounted on the backs of uncouth beasts. 

"Forthwith, in terrible Magnificence, 
An hundred Trumpets sent their Voice before, 
To tell the People that their awful Prince 
Her Progress now began: that stately Roar 
Through every Street imperiously flew. 
And warn 'd all eyes this mighty Sight to view 

"When lo, the sweating Throngs her way bespread 
"With admirations of her Pomp and Train. 
Two squires before the rest at distance rid, 
Suspition and Envy; both did rein 
Their fitting Steeds, the one a Fox, the other 
A Wolf and fore'd them on to march together. "39 

' ' Then came the Coach which two strange Monsters drew, 
For one a dreadful Lybian Dragon was. 
Who from his mouth did flaming Sulphur spew, 
Empoisoning all the Way he was to pass: 
The other, an enormous crocodile. 
The most accursed Son of happy Nile. 

"On them two fierce Postillions mounted were 
Intolerable headstrong Anger, who 
Her Dragon's sides with restless Lashes tore 
Yet knew not why she him tormented so:*o 
And Cruelty, whose heart was harder than 
His knotty Crocodile's black iron skin. 

"Upon the Coachbox sate a Driver, hight 
Selfwil, a madbrain'd most outrageous He; 
Who makes devouring Speed his sole Delight, 
Though thousand Perils chide his Fervency 
Never could Hills or Dales, or Sea or Land, 
Or desperate Precipices make him stand. "4i 



39 So in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1, 4, 30, Envy rides on a wolf. 

40 Cf . The Faerie Queene, 1, 4, 34. Spenser 's Wrath has equally blind 
passions : 

"Yet, willfull man, he never would forecast, 
How many mischieves should ensue his heedless hast. ' ' 

41 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 1, 4, 34, Satan, the postillion of Pride's chariot. 



1912] Cory : Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 341 

On the brazen chariot sat the dreadful queen as, in Spenser, 

Pride sat in her car drawn by the six unequal beasts of the 

other Sins: 

"Her steely Coat's all smear 'd with gore; her Hands 
Gripe two imprison 'd Twists of angry Snakes, 
With which though still her Coachman never stands 
Eternally she threshes him, and makes 
His furious speed more speedy grow, that she 
Might at her Prey as soon 's her Wishes be. ' ' 

Her infernal brood followed her: Ravishment, riding upon a 
goat,^' Heresy on a Hydra,*^ and many others. 

Persecution goes to England and, at her summons, many 
flock to her standards. Psyche and the few who stand fast are 
driven forth while the lawless rob, murder, and burn. Psyche 
and a friend, Uranius, take refuge in a cave. A lion, in search 
of prey, rushes into their harborage. But he suddenly becomes 
mild at the sight of the two sufferers, as does the lion before 
Una in Spenser. The two exiles are captured, Uranius is burned 
at the stake, and Psyche is tortured in prison. But Phylax 
frees her and tells her that an even more exalted martyrdom is 
reserved for her lot. Psyche is brought to a desert and aban- 
doned to many trials. Satan sends against her Despair, the 
usual Spenserian figure with hollow, staring eyes and all the 
foulness of Duessa unmasked, armed with rust-eaten swords and 
daggers. This fury makes a long and subtle speech, taunts 
Psyche with her many sins, as Spenser's apparition taunts the 
Red Cross Knight with his association with Duessa, and incites 
her to suicide. But Psyche remains firm and the hag vanishes 
with a shriek. Psyche burns in a sort of inner fire of religious 
exaltation. 



42 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 1, 4, 24, Lechery riding on a goat. 

43 Of. The Faerie Queene, 1, 7, 16 sq., Duessa rides on a hydra-like beast 
given her by Orgoglio. Cf. also Beaumont: 

"When lo, the sweating throngs her way bespread 
With admiration of her Pomp and Train." • 

and Spenser: 

' ' Huge routs of people did about them band 
Shouting for joy." (1,4,36) 



342 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 



Samuel Woodford 

Beaumont's huge epic was ushered into the world with some 
rapturous commendatory verses by Samuel Woodford, who, 
although he wrote later than Milton, is worth brief considera- 
tion for the more complete understanding of this eccentric 
though once important school of poetry. Woodford used the 
favorite stanzas of the Fletchers very freely in his paraphrases of 
the Psalms. He added variations of his own and experimented, 
even more freely than Quarles, in shortening the lines occasion- 
ally to give more lyrical quality to the paraphrases where the 
originals seemed to demand it. In 1679 he published A Para- 
phrase upon the Canticles with a preface that is full of interest 
to the student of the history of criticism.** But what interests 
us here is that Woodford, lest the frail reader should find 
poison in the Oriental langors of the paraphrase, added an 
Epoda or Legend of Love, so styled "for honour's sake to the 
great Spenser, whose Stanza of Nine I have used, and who has 
Intituled the six Books which we have compleat of his Faery 
Queen, by the several Legends of Holiness, Temperance, 
Chastity, Friendship, Justice and Courtesy." This Epoda, 
imitated partly from Spenser's Hymne to Divine Love and 
partly from the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins in The Fasrie 
Queene, shows strongly the exaggerated Puritanism of the School 
of the Fletchers and their prurience, which despite its idealistic 
theory is nothing short of strumpet-minded. We cannot be too 
severe with these tough old divines. 

The first canto of Woodford's poems sounds in harsh, sturdy 
echoes the thought of Spenser's Hymne. In the second canto he 
juggles fluently with Spenserian allegory. Lust, or the devil 
Legion, came to possess a lost soul. Before he arrived Idleness 
had swept the empty rooms and darkened the lights and win- 
dows. Fancy let in loose Desire. After him the Fiend rode in 



44 I have discussed this preface at some length in ' ' The Critics of 
Edmund Spenser," Univ. Calif. 'Puhl. Modern Philology, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 
122 sq. 



1912] Cory : Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 343 

in triumph at the head of a pageant like that which issued from 
Spenser 's House of Pride : 

"So in Desire came vainest of the Three, 
And after him in Triumph rode the Fiend; 
Whom seven Spirits, full as bad as he. 
And lo sang to Love, that Heav'n did tend 
So sang they all, but with unequal grace 
As were their looks; for some their brows did bend. 
And grin'd most horrid with distorted Face; 
Others were blithe and smiled as they along did pass. 

"Folly, the First, by her Habit seem'd a Maid, 
And by her Face, which was excelling fair; 



Mirth was a youth of beautiful regard, 

With chearful Eyes, plump downy Cheeks and Chin, 

Him Dalliance followed next, a Damsel gay. 
Of light behaviour, as she well could feign; 
And wantonly her Brest did open lay, 
The Lover who came next to entertain; 
Tho who the He were of her mighty Train, 
She was not much solicitous to know. ' ' 

Then came Genius or Comus: 

"A right good Fellow, as his Belly show'd 
Which in a Swath reacht almost to his Knee 
And made him passage through th ' admiring crowd, 
Which shouting to him louted, as to them he bow 'd. ' ' 

More grisly figures followed like consequences: Sin with a 
thousand heads, wretched Poverty, and Death, described with a 
line plundered from Milton, 

"But Death the third, the same shape always kept. 
If Shape it might be call 'd, that shape had none. ' ' 

Wherever he went he was attended by unquiet Care, Suspicion, 
Impudence, Riotice, and Irreligion. Without the door waited 
Distrust, Jealousy, Fear. Such was the company that entered 
the soul of a wretched man who sought only earthly Love. 

We need not follow Woodford in his third canto, where he 
writes of the moral anarchy described in some of the historical 
passages in the Old Testament and hymns the rise of lawful 



344 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

marriage. Nor is it necessary to meddle further with the 
work of other poets of this school who persisted even into the 
eighteenth century. Indeed to many readers I shall seem to have 
exhumed freakish poems out of all proportion. But it is high 
time that we understood more clearly than any critic has yet 
set forth the immediate poetic environment of Lycidas, Paradise 
Lost, and Paradise Regained, the welter of religion and sensu- 
ality, of lofty idealism and ferocious bigotry, from which the 
great Puritan drew far more than we commonly realize. Too 
much attention has been given to Vondel, Andreini, and other 
remote influences. Apart from the great Greek and Latin poets 
and from the great books of philosophy and religion, Milton's 
literary lineage is to be traced from his master Spenser and from 
these strange perverted works of a group of poets who had a 
much greater academic vogue than is now generally understood, 
the School of the Fletchers.*^ 

These curious, half-diseased, half-divine poets were in one 
respect the truest Spenserians who ever lived. They did not 
distil the rarest essence of their master as did Milton and Keats 
and other great English poets. But they did more than merely 
loot The Faerie Queene for lines and stanzas. With the passing 
of the School of the Fletchers there passed the last ambitious, 
absurd attempts to rear the cumbersome, tottering framework 
of The Faerie Queene to the very stars. The eighteenth century 
poets imitated Spenser elegantly and superficially, for the most 
part, as they imitated all their masters. The romanticists, when 
they reached their period of full triumph, did not imitate ; they 
were inspired. But the Fletchers and their crew, besides plun- 
dering and botching lines and stanzas, outlined gigantic schemes 
like that set forth in Spenser's letter to Raleigh, that superb 
manifesto of idealism, and turned Milton from his dreams of 
Arthur to write audaciously of God and Satan. With the School 
of the Fletchers such heaven-storming became the fashion in 



45 I have analyzed the work of the last known poet of this school, 
William Thompson, in my "Spenser, Thomson, and Romanticism," Publ. 
Mod. Lang. Asoc., xxvi, 1. 



\ 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The Scliool of the Fletchers, and Milton. 345 

England as it was already the fashion on the continent. We 
cannot fairly but admire as well as laugh at the rare audacity 
with which the School of the Fletchers strove to rear Babels of 
poetry. And in this chaos Milton saw light. 

This is the wholesome value of noting the relation of such 
queer stuff (if you will), and the master work. And the literary 
historian wonders as he looks down the long avenues of literature 
at great men and small, whether our hordes of little realists and 
little romanticists who huddle about the feet of our living masters 
will have as much to give, two centuries hence, as these Fletchers 
at whom it is so easy to laugh. 

MILTON 

For a while Milton was certainly definitely enlisted in this 
school. And even when he rose above it in many respects, some 
influence lingered long. In his earliest poems he followed these 
academic elders rather closely. He mourns the death of a fair 
infant prettily and inappropriately enough in cadences that will 
sound sufficiently familiar to the student of the Fletchers : 

"Yet thou art not inglorious in thy fate; 
For so Apollo with unweeting hand, 
Whilom did slay his dearly loved mate, 
Young Hyacinth, born on Eurotas' strand, 
Young Hyacinth, the pride of Spartan land; 
But then transformed him to a purple flower: 
Alack, that so to change thee Winter had no power!" 

Like a true Spenserian of his time, he made his subject (in lyric 
poetry), a mere makeshift for the enumeration of lovely details. 
Like the Fletchers, he experimented with stanza forms, making 
the last line of the rhyme-royal an alexandrine. But he had not 
arrived. In The Passion (1630) he employed the same stanza 
and style to celebrate the subject-matter which was the most real 
to him all his life. The poet is trying to soar. But, like many 
far humbler undergraduate poets, he masks his sincerity in the 
affectations of contemporaries. There is no doubt that he was 
profoundly stirred by the passion of Christ. But he wrote : 



346 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

"Mine eye hath found that sad sepulchral rock 
That was the casket of Heaven's richest store, 
And here, through grief my feeble hands uplock, 
Yet on the softened quarry would I score 
My plaining verse as lively as before; 
For sure so well instructed are my tears 
That they would fitly fall in ordered characters. ' ' 

Milton could not as yet distinguish between Spenser and Spen- 
serians, William Browne, who, in his garrulous Britannia's 
Pastorals could often follow Spenser very charmingly, was also 
capable of writing : 

"My blubb'ring pen her sable tears lets fall 
In characters right." 

But Milton was coming to a realization of his faults. At the end 
of The Passion we read : 

' ' This Subject the Author finding to be above the years he had when he 
wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished. ' ' 

Yet Milton's aspirations were already as immense and as 
impressive as when he began Paradise Lost. I like to compare 
Milton and Keats when they wrote At a Vacation Exercise in the 
College (1628) and the Specimen of an Induction to a Poem. 
Both were dreaming vaguely and delightedly with Spenser. 
They were toying with boundless ambitions. Keats was lost in 
the delight of dancing plumes, glittering cuirasses, and Gothic 
arches. He had no story to tell. But he was strengthening his 
wings for The Eve of Saint Agnes. Milton's dreams were pleas- 
antly obscured by his luxurious memories of Spenser and his 
followers. He was poring over Drayton's Poly-Olhio7i and its 
source, the description of the marriage of the Thames and the 
Medway in The Faerie Queeyie. He was dazzled by the pageants 
of stately rivers and aglow with the historical and legendary 
associations that haunted their banks. With boyish ardor he 
invoked them : 

"Eivers arise; whether thou be the son 
Of utmost Tweed, or Ouse, or gulfy Dun, 
Or Trent, who, like some earth-born Giant spreads 
liis thirty arms along indented meads. 
Or sullen Mole, that runneth underneath, 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 347 

Or Sevren swift, guilty of maiden's death, 

Or rocky Avon, or of sedgy Lea, 

Or coaly Tyne, or ancient hallowed Dee, 

Or Humber loud, that keeps the Scythian's name. 

Or Medway smooth, or royal-towered Thame. ' ' 

But his desires were not lulled to slumber by the warm glow and 
pomp of these visions. He longed to use his language for greater 
purposes : 

"Yet I had rather, if I were to choose, 
Thy service in some graver subject use, 
Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, 
Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound: 
Such where the deep transported mind may soar 
Above the wheeling poles, and at Heaven's door 
Look in, and see each blissful Deity 
How he before the thunderous throne doth lie. 
Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings." 

His youthful Latin poems were more often playful because 
they followed the lighter verse of Ovid and Horace rather than 
the high seriousness of Virgil, Tasso, and Spenser. But his In 
Quint iim Novemhris (1626), a poem on the anniversary of the 
Gunpowder Plot, celebrated the supposed attempts of Satan and 
the Pope to ruin England through the agency of Guy Fawkes 
in the academic Spenserian manner then in vogue. In 1626, too, 
Phineas Fletcher probably completed or was completing his 
Latin poem on the same subject, the Locustae with its English 
paraphrase The Appolyonists, already discussed. Fletcher's 
poem was not published until the following year and we can 
establish no definite relationship between his work and Milton's. 1 
Both used popular contemporary ideas. Both treated a popular.' 
superstition in a vein of classical and Spenserian allegory. But) 
we know that upon Paradise Lost Fletcher's poem left a strong! 
impress. And in this academic exercise of IMilton's the young '^ 
poet was strengthening himself for the great epic. He was 
making his first studies for his picture of the Prince of Darkness : 

"And now, in his flight, Satan sees appear the fields girdled by white 
wave-beaten cliffs, the land loved by the sea-god, named of old from 
Neptune's son Albion 

"Now his swift flight had carried him beyond the rimy Alps to the 



348 University of California Puhlications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

borders of Italy. On his left hand were the ancient land of the Sabines 
and the cloud-wrapped Apennine; on his right Etruria, ill-famed for its 
poisoners. Thee too, Tiber, he saw, giving furtive kisses to Thetis." 
There follows fierce satire on Catholicism, of the kind which 
Milton and the Fletchers took too readily from The Faerie 
Queene. Satan came to the Pope as the vile Archimago came to 
the Red Cross Knight and as the Tempter came to Christ in 
Giles Fletcher's poem — in the guise of a hermit. In dreams he 
incited the Pope against England. The poet conjures up a place 
of horror in the manner of the classical poets and of Spenser's 
description of Hell in his tale of Guy on 's visit to Mammon's 
dark realms: 

' ' There is a place girt eternally with the darkness of night, the vast 
foundations of a building long since given to ruin, now the cave of fierce 
Murder and double-tongued Treachery, whom the hag Discord brought forth 
at one birth. Here amid heaps of rubble and broken stones lie the unburied 
bodies of men, corpses impaled on steel. Here forever sits Craft, black, 
with distorted eyes; and Fury; and Fear; and a thousand types of death. 
Pale Horror flies about the place. ' '-is 

These apparitions "the Babylonish priest" sent against England. 
But the Heavenly Father pitied his people and frustrated ''the 
daring cruelty of the Papists." This crude and abusive poem, 
though drawing the most tasteless elements from Spenser and 
the Spenserians, foreshadowed vaguely the epic to come.'*^ 

But Milton's mind was not yet embittered. From some of 
his more intimate Latin poems we learn that England, at least, 
was still Fairyland to him. While in Italy he confessed his 
aspirations to Manso in his most interesting Latin poem. His 
thoughts go back to his own land and its poets, to Chaucer whom, 
like Spenser in The Shepheards Calendar, he worships as "our 
Tityrus." "You," he writes Manso, 



46 Cf. The Faerie Queene, 2, 7, 22-23. In Mammon's cave, hard by the 
gates of Hell, lurked "cruel Kevenge, " Despight, Treason, "gnawing 
Gealosy, " Feare, and many more. 

"And over them sad Horror with grim hew 
Did always sore, beating his yron wings. ' ' 
Of course the famous similar description in the sixth book of Virgil probably 
stimulated most of these passages. 

47 The quotations above and all subsequent citations from Milton's Latin 
poems are from William Vaughn Moody 's translation, the Cambridge Edition 
of Milton, Boston and New York, 1899. 



1912] Cory : Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 349 

" .... You, who are so kind, will not scorn a stranger's muse, she who 
, nourished sparely in the frozen north, lately dared a venturesome flight 
through the cities of Italy. I too, methinks, have heard, through the obscure 
shades of night, the swans singing in my river at home, where Thames, 
bending her argent urns, lets her glaucous locks stream wide into the ocean. 
What do I say? did not Chaucer himself, our Tityrus, come once to these 
shores ? ' ' 

He speaks of his haunting desire to write of Arthur, the national 

hero whom Spenser had chosen for his Faerie Queene. And 

it seems reasonable to believe that the hero of Spenser was 

as much in Milton's mind as the hero of the chronicles and 

romances. For he writes of him as : ' ' Arthur, who carried war 

into fairyland. ' '** To the end his dreams of Arthur were tinged 

by Spenser's vague, magnificent abstraction. One thinks as 

much of the dim paths of The Faerie Queene as of Malory, 

despite the citation of names familiar from the Morte Darthur, 

when, in Paradise Begained, the blind poet describes the ' ' ladies 

of the Hesperides," with a characteristic, wistful reminiscence 

of his earlier epic dreams, as : 

"Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since 
Of faery damsels met in forest wide 
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, 
Launcelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore. ' '49 

' ' On the Morning of Christ 's Nativity ' ' 

Before Milton had left college, while he was writing for the 
most part in the ephemeral modes of his day, he spoke out bold 
and clear once with his own voice. The hymn, On the Morning 
of Christ's Nativity (1629) is far more significant than its 
slightly later companion-piece The Passion, which I have already 



48 It is more likely that this is inspired by Spenser than by the legend 
of Arthur brought to Avalon. The wounded Arthur did not sail to Avalon 
to carry on war. 

49 Paradise Begained, book 2, lines 357 sq. As significant evidence in 
connection with Milton's fusion of Spenser with sources like Geoffrey of 
Monmouth, we may note that Milton, in his History of England (ed. Sym- 
mons, vol. 4, p. 13), quotes a passage from Spenser to supplement Geoffrey 
much as a modern historian draws from two sources of equal repute. Lest 
I give false impression here I should add that Milton was sceptical enough 
about the historical Arthur. The point is that Spenser was clearly almost 
always in his mind when he thought of the British king. 



350 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

discussed. It opens with a typical seventeenth century Spen- 
serian prelude in that Spenserian variation of the rhyme-royal 
for which we have already seen his partiality. William Vaughn 
Moody chooses a word with a very expressive connotative value 
when he speaks of the "quaint dulcity" which, through the 
influence of Giles Fletcher, appears in the opening stanzas. 

"See how from far upon the Eastern road 
The star-led Wizards haste with odours sweet! 
Oh! run; prevent them with thy humble ode, 
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet. ' ' 

Then the poem leaps into the swift, abrupt, ringing music of 
The Hymn, proper. Whatever lyrical strophes may have been 
suggestive, the stanza was Milton's own. And here was the first 
distinctly creative use of a final alexandrine since Spenser had 
shown its possibilities when he used it to give delicate music to 
the heavy, pedantic stanza-of -eight (abahhchc). In Milton's 
new stanza the sharp strokes of the trimeter couplets were con- 
trolled by the succeeding pentameters and a tetrameter modu- 
lated not too abruptly into the long, solemn swing of the final 
alexandrine. There are tasteless conceits here and there. But 
unhappy is he whose sensibilities are so fragile that the flaws 
blind him to the superb lyrical flashes that abound. Milton 
seems to have had Spenser as well as the Spenserians in his 
consciousness. It is probable that he borrowed an elaborate 
conceit from the Song to Elisa in the April eclogue of The 
Shepheards Calender, unhappily, to gild over his gold. Spenser 
wrote : 

' ' I sawe Phoebus thrust out his golden hedde, 

Upon her to gaze: 
But when he sawe how broade her beames did spredde. 

It did him amaze. 
He blusht to see another Sunne belowe, 
Ne durst againe his fyrie face out showe: 

Let him, if he dare, 

His brightnesse compare 
With hers, to have the overthrown ' ' 

The more sonorous lines of Milton, despite their imitative 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 351 

artificiality of concept, are significant in the development of the 
music of his maturity : 

' ' And, though the shady gloom 
Had given day her room, 
The Sun himself withheld his wonted speed, 
And hid his head for shame, 
As his inferior flame 
The new-enlightened world no more should need: 

He saw a greater Sun appear 
Than his bright Throne or burning axletree could bear. ' ' 

But Milton was not yet large enough to borrow masterfully, to 
combine subtly from a dozen sources. How little he had yet 
accomplished he himself admitted, as he left Cambridge, in the 
famous sonnet that has been as a quiet, heartening hymn to 
thousands of young men who have that noble combination of 
pride and humility. 

"How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, 

Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year! 
My hasting days fly on with full career, 
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. 

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth. 
That I to manhood am arrived so near. 
And inward ripeness doth mvich less appear. 

That some more timely-happy spirits indu'th. 

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, 

It shall be still in strictest measure even 
To that same lot, however mean or high, 

Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. 
All is, if I have grace to use it so. 

As ever in my great Task-master 's eye. ' ' 



"L 'Allegro and "II Penseroso" 
In rural retirement at Horton Milton's genius developed by 
leaps and bounds. That Spenser was good leaven in those days 
of golden quietude we can hardly doubt when we think of 
Milton's ideal surroundings and youthful idealism, perfectly 
appropriate for a continued perusal of the leisurely Faerie 
Queene. The days of L' Allegro and II Penseroso were the 



352 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

fullest days of detachment and dreams. L' Allegro derives 
remotely from the Spenserian pastoral as developed by Drayton 
and his friends, Brown and Wither.^" Spenser, though he had, 
in the main, followed the beaten path of the Renaissance pas- 
toral, had suggested much to his ingenious followers in his 
ShepJieards Calender. He strove to nationalize the pastoral by 
transfering the crown from the ''Romish Tityrus," Virgil, to the 
English Tityrus, Chaucer. He introduced the more brisk style 
of the fable, following Chaucer at a great distance. Above all, 
in the airy roundelay of Willy and Perigot, with its adroit sug- 
gestion of popular improvisation, he enlivened the pastoral with 
a species of light-hearted, semi-popular song like the French 
pastourelle — which had been forgotten in England since the days 
of Henryson's Bohin and Mahyne but which had been preserved 
in effect in Prance in the blithe notes of Clement Marot. Of the 
many imitators of The ShepJieards Calender Drayton and his 
group were by far the most astute in seizing upon and develop- 
ing those most fertile ideas which Spenser had barely suggested. 
Drayton introduced tangibly the much needed element of humor. 
The languid, plaining shepherd lived on, but Drayton and his 
friends were for the most part more interested in such lilting 
creations as the ballad of bonny Dowsabelle, imitated from Sir 
Thopas at the suggestion of Spenser's pseudo-Chaucerian poems. 
Drayton and Browne gossiped with real countrywives and conned 
their wondrous lore about Queen Mab and her fairy rout. 
Browne and Wither sang of may-poles and country-folk so 
blithely in the light tetrameter measure that Milton doubtless 
learned much from them when he chose the same metre and very 
similar subject-matter. L 'Allegro — peering through the two 
aged oaks at the cottage chimney, watching Corydon and Thyrsis 
at their savory dinner, 



50 This and the following generalizations, relating Milton's L' Allegro 
even remotely with the Spenserian pastorals may seem fanciful to many here. 
In my "Golden Age of the Spenserian Pastoral," Publ. Mod. Lang. Assoc, 
XXV, 2, I have tried to show in detail what I conceive to have been the 
peculiar development of the Spenserian pastoral towards a delicate gaiety 
that distinguishes it sharply from the English eclogues of Virgilian and 
Italian lineage. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 353 

"Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses," 
attending a holiday with young and old, drinking the spicy ale 
while some one told of fairy Mab and the drudging Goblin — is 
the kinsman of Willy and Perigot, of Drayton's Batte and 
Gorbo, Browne's Willy and Roget, and Wither 's Philarete who 
sang of fields and dainty nosegays even in prison. II Penseroso 
is a bit more personal. We catch the young poet at his dearer 
dreams. Like Spenser he is poring over Chaucer's alluring 
fragment. The Squire 's Tale : 

' ' The story of Cambuscan bold, 
Of Camball and of Algarsife, 
And who had Canace to wife, 
That owned the virtuous ring and glass. 
And of the wondrous horse of brass 
On which the Tartar King did ride." 

Into the magic glass that Chaucer and Spenser described with 
wondering delight, Milton had peered as eagerly as Britomart 
in search of Arthegal. For in earlier days, too, At a Vacation 
Exercise, he dreamed of a cave like Spenser's and Ariosto's cave 
of Merlin wherein dwelt 

' * A Sybil old, bow-bent with crooked age. 
That far events full wisely could presage. 
And in Time's long and dark prospective-glass 
Foresaw what future days should bring to pass. ' ' 

II Penseroso was reading, too, of the great battle of Camball 
and Triamond in Spenser's continuation of The Squire's Tale. 
He writes of what 

" .... Great Bards beside 
In sage and solemn tunes have sung. 
Of turneys and inchantments drear, 
Where more is meant than meets the ear. ' ' 

Critics have hardly been fanciful in describing this last line as 
a reference to the allegory of The Faerie Queene. And when 
Milton prepared his Arcades for Lady Strange, Countess of 
Derby, he must have remembered the prodigal honors that 
Spenser had heaped upon her in The Teares of the Muses and 
in his graceful picture of his other two cousins and her as 



354 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

"Phyllis, Carilis, and sweet Amarylis, " in Colin Clouts Come 
Home Again. The younger poet wrote : 

"Fame, that her high worth to raise 
Seemed erst so lavish and profuse, 
We may justly now accuse 
Of detraction from her praise. ' ' 

Perhaps these last lines have in them a touch of that bitter- 
ness which came to the young idealist, even in the seclusion of 
Horton, w^ith a growing sense of real life. It is the bitterness 
that afflicts a young poet when he first lifts his eyes from the 
charmed books over which he has been poring, intolerant, 
because of his idealism, of human failing, and oppressed with a 
belief that his own times are degenerate. 

"COMUS" 

In Comus and Lycidas, despite the lofty faiths which Milton 
brought to bear against his doubts, the tone of complaint is 
insistent and impressive. He was turning from the realms of 
pure romance, from the dim lands of Cambuscan and of 
Gloriana. Or rather he was coming to question their reality. 
In Spenser he had read : 

' ' Of Court, it seemes, men Courtesie doe call, 
For that it there most useth to abound: 
And well beseemeth that in Princes hall 
That vertue should be plentifully found. 
Which of all goodly manners is the ground, 
And roote of civill conversation: 
Eight so in Faery court it did redound. 
Where eurteous Knights and Ladies most did won 
Of all on earth, and made a matchlesse paragon, "si 

In Comus Milton accepted from his master the etymology of 
the word ' * courtesy ' ' but found the virtue no longer in the place 
where it originated. His heroine imagined that in the magician 
disguised as a rustic she had seen 



51 The Faerie Queene, 6, 1, 1. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 355 

" .... Honest-offered courtesy, 
Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds, 
With smoky rafters, than in tapestry halls 
And courts of princes, where it first was named, 
And yet is most pretended. "52 

"When Milton came to create a Bower of Bliss in Comus he could 
no longer write with the irresponsible, almost innocent, delight 
in voluptuousness with M^hich Spenser described the arbors and 
drunken vines of the languorous Acrasia. The Circe of Homer, 
Tasso's Armida, Spenser's Acrasia, who all doubtless lingered 
in the mind of the poet of Comus, seduced their victims by sheer 
bodily beauty. Hazlitt has an ingenious remark worth ponder- 
ing at this point : 

* ' The character which a living poet has given of Spenser would be 
much more true of Milton. 

' . . . . Yet not more sweet 

Than pure was he, and not more pure than wise 

High Priest of all the Muses' mysteries.' 
Spenser, on the contrary, is very apt to pry into mysteries which do not 
belong to the Muses. Milton's voluptuousness is not lascivious or sensual. 
He describes beautiful objects for their own sakes. Spenser has an eye 
to the consequences and steeps everything in pleasure not of the purest 
kind." 

This is a reasonable comparison. But I still urge that Spenser 
had an almost innocent delight in voluptuousness when he made 
vivid the temptations of Acrasia ostensibly for the glory of 
Guyon's temperance. It is to be remembered that in an age of 
enthusiasm art and morals may be perfectly reconciled by the 
greater minds, while in an age of reason comes restless doubt. 
Men take sides violently and become cynics or militant moral- 
ists, voluptuaries or prudes. In Milton's age sophistication 
had followed the death of the "first, fine, careless rapture." 
Acrasia, as I have said, enticed her victims by frankly exposing 
her beautiful, naked body. It does not seem necessary to Spenser 
to inform us that this attractive creature would have us reel 
back into the beast. Sin may be lovely, but Temperance is so 
strong that it needs no sight of ugliness to fire it to conquest. 



52 Comus, lines 322 sq. 



356 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

Ariosto, writing in a very sophisticated period and country, was 
fain to show that the beautiful Alcina unmasked was a loath- 
some hag, though he was not, of course, seriously concerned with 
morality. Spenser borrowed this picture but only for the pur- 
poses of religious satire when he created Duessa. Acrasia 
remained beautiful even when overcome. Milton is more nearly 
like Ariosto, in this one respect, in temper. But he is even more 
severe. He never allows us to lose sight of the bestial that leers 
through all the allurements of sin in Comus. Then too, while 
Acrasia proudly displays her body, Comus must appeal to 
reason. He is the polished sophist who argues with wonderful 
plausibility. It is necessary for him to try to buttress frank 
desire with sneaking reason. 

But enough on the sensual in Spenser and Milton. From his 
"sage and serious Spenser" Milton could certainly draw high 
moral truths. Belphoebe, Spenser's huntress wandering like 
Diana through the deep woods, Britomart, the warrior-maiden 
conquering all lustful knights, Spenser's perfect types of 
chastity, inspired Milton with faith to write his credo boldly in 
Comus. He speaks through the steadfast brother who believes 
that chastity is a defence in itself. Still the benignant influence 
of Spenser 's dreams keeps Milton from absolute bitterness : 

" 'Tis Chastity, my brother, Chastity, 
She that has that is clad in complete steel, 
And like a quivered nymph with arrows keen, 
May trace huge forests, and unharboured heaths, 
Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds; 
Where, through the saered rays of chastity, 
No savage fierce, bandite, or mountaineer 
Will dare to soil her virgin purity. ' ' 

Spenser also had made his Red Cross Knight give Una lofty 
assurance as he entered the dark and squalid den of Error : 

' ' Vertue gives her selfe light through darknesse for to wade. ' ' 

And the poet of Comus made the confident elder brother say: 

* ' Virtue could see to do what Virtue would 
By her own radiant light. ' ' 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 357 

Everywhere the presence of Spenser's influence is elusively 
apparent. Where Milton borrowed so masterfully from Homer, 
Tasso, Spenser, Peele, John Fletcher, and perhaps many more, it 
becomes mere pedantry to attempt a collection of unquestionable 
parallels. Yet the temptation is great. As Milton wrote of his 
Lady, Virtue incarnate, perhaps it was the memory of Spenser's 
Sir Guyon or Temperance who, under similar temptations, was 
protected by the sage advice of a palmer, to describe twilight as 

" .... Grey-hooded Even, 
Like a sad Votarist in palmer's weed." 

This is an example instructive of how a Spenserian fancy might 
cling in the background of Milton's consciousness. More strik- 
ing parallels are not wanting. Spenser writes of "Fayre 
Cynthia," who through a cloud 

"Breaks forth her silver beames and her bright head 
Discovers to the world discomfited: 
Of the poore traveller that went astray, 
With thousand blessings she is berried." 

In Comus the moon is similarly apostrophized : 

" .... And thou, fair Moon, 
That wont'st to love the traveller's benison, 
Stoop thy pale visage through an amber cloud, 
And disinherit Chaos. ' '53 

When, at the close of Milton's poem, the guardian spirit tells 
how he had heard from Meliboeus, 

"The soothest Shepherd that ere piped on plains," 

how to summon the water-nymph Sabrina, we remember how 
tenderly she had been sung by Spenser and feel that this 
Meliboeus, hovering in the background, more powerful even than 
the protector of the Lady, is a veiled reference, of the kind of 
which Milton was particularly fond, to his own guardian spirit, 
Spenser, whose lofty faith in chastity and virtue encouraged 
Milton to overrule his bitterness in Comus. 



53 The Faerie Queene, 3, 1, 43, and Comus, lines 331 sq. 



358 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 



"Lycidas" 

In Lycidas this bitterness is more unruly and is, in this case, 
plausibly traceable, in part, to the influence of Spenser. At 
least as early as Thomas Warton, critics have pointed out the 
similarity between the abusive digression of religious polemics 
in Lycidas and the religious janglings of Piers and Palinode in 
the Maye eclogue of The Shepheards Calender. Mantuan and 
Petrarch had attacked bad clergy in their eclogues. But their 
influence is more remote than that of Milton's chosen master. 
Moreover Spenser's eclogue was the specific attack of Protestant 
upon Catholic. In this he was followed by some of his imitators, 
notably Phineas Fletcher, in The Appolyonists and in his 
Piscatorie Eclogues (1633). We have good evidence that Spen- 
ser's abusive eclogue appealed particularly to Milton. In 
Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against 
Smectymnuus^* he quotes from Maye one of Spenser's fierce 
thrusts at corrupt prelates. And the satire in Milton's elegy is 
markedly similar in spirit and phrase to the harsh lines in 
Spenser's discordant pastoral. Milton makes Saint Peter, "the 
Pilot of the Galilean Lake, ' ' utter characteristic reproof : 

' ' How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, 
Anow of such as, for their bellies' sake. 
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold! 
Of other care they little reckoning make 
Than how to scramble at the shearer 's feast. 
And shove away fhe worthy bidden guest. 
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
A sheep-hook, or have learnt aught else the least 
That to the faithful Herdman's art belongs! 
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; 
And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs 
Grate on their scannel pipes of wretched straw; 
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed. 
But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, 
Kot inwardly, and foul contagion spread. ' ' 



54 Ed. Symmons, vol. 1, p. 197, 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 359 

And Spenser wrote: 

"Those faytours little regarden their charge, 
While they, letting their sheepe rimne at large, 
Passen their time, that should be sparely spent, 
In lustihede and wanton meryment. 
Thilke same bene shepeheardes for the Devils stedde, 
That playen while their flockes be unf edde. " 

It is interesting to observe that while Lycidas, in its general 
character, turns away from the Spenserian pastoral to the Vir- 
gilian, its digressions, the most earnest and personal parts of the 
poem, derive almost certainly from The Shepheards Calender. 
The ecclesiastical satire, though the lines burn with Milton's 
fine strength, is not pleasant reading. But the other famous 
digression — the momentary doubt of the youthful idealist — con- 
tains the most beautiful and the most human lines in the elegy. 

"Alas! what boots it with uncessant care 
To tend the homely, slighted, Shepherd's trade, 
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? 
Were it not better done, as others use. 
To sport with Amarylis in the shade, 
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair? 
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 
(That last infirmity of noble mind) 
To scorn delights and live laborious days; 
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find. 
And think to burst out into sudden blaze, 
Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears, 
And slits the thin-spun life. 'But not the praise,' 
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears; 
'Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, 
Nor in the glistering foil 

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies. 
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes 
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove; 
As he pronounces lastly on each deed, 
Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed. ' ' ' 

It is important, for students of literary influence, to notice that 
while Milton took some of his impulse for this passage from the 
despair of the young poet Cuddie and the lofty encouragement 
of Piers in Spenser's October, yet he was experiencing, at first 
hand, precisely the mood which Spenser expressed. Spenser 



360 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

was doubting, but aspiring to rise to epic heights in his Faerie 
Queene. Milton was expressing the same temporary unfaith and 
discouragement of youth but meditating none the less upon his 
great national poem. 

In the serene Arcadia of Spenser and his followers, where 
came no botanists, Milton learned the graceful trick of weaving 
artificial garlands of flowers from every season. Spenser adopted 
the flower-passage from earlier Elizabethans and gave it cur- 
rency in his song to Elisa and his elegy to Dido in The Shep- 
heards Calender. He was enthusiastically imitated in the pas- 
torals of Drayton, Barnefield, Wither, Basse and by the School 
of the Fletchers many times. Milton followed exquisitely the 
fashion when he bid the valleys — 

"Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes, 
J That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers, 

! And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. 

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, 

The tufted crow-toe, and pale gessamine. 

The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet. 

The glowing violet, 

The musk-rose, and the well-attired wood-bine. 

With cowslips wan that hang with pensive head. 

And every flower that sad embroidery wears; 

Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, 

And daffadillies fill their cups with tears. 

To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. ' ' 

It is likely, too, that Spenser had his share in inculcating one 
more faith with which Milton answered the various question- 
ings of his "still small voice." Spenser, when, in his lament 
for Dido, he had popularized the pastoral elegy in England, 
employed a Renaissance convention, the abrupt hopeful turn at 
the close. In this he was followed by his imitators, Drayton. 
Browne, and others, and finally by Milton when he wrote : 

* ' Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more. 
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, 
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. 
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, 
And yet anon repairs his drooping head. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 361 

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, 

Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves, 

And hears the unexpressive nuptial song, 
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. 
There entertain him all the saints above, 
In solemn troops and sweet societies. 
That sing, and singing in their glory move. 
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. 
Now, Lycidas, the Shepherds weep no more. ' ' 

In the same manner, in imitation of Marot, Spenser had written : 

"Why wayle we then? why weary we the gods with playnts. 
As if some evill were to her betight? 
She raignes a goddess now emong the saintes, 
That whilome was the saynt of shepheards light: 
And is enstalled nowe in heavens hight. 
I see thee, blessed soule, I see, 
Walke in Elisian fieldes so free. 
O happy herse! 
Might I once come to thee! O that I might! 
O joyful verse! "55 

We have already seen, from his Latin poem to Manso, that 
Milton in Italy was still as much in Fairyland as he was when 
at Horton. The rude awakening, signs of which appear in 
Comus and Lycidas, was delayed by travel. But when he 
returned to England and devoted his activities to the bitter 
political struggles (1642-1658) he bade farewell to all dreams 
of an ideal England and an ideal Arthur. The tragedy of the 
fall of man and the loss of Paradise was more appropriate to his 
distressed mind. From now on the gentle, passionless visions 
came back to him only in moods of momentary and wistful 
reminiscence. Dryden has suggested that Spenser was dis- 
couraged from continuing The Faerie Queen because the living 
court of Gloriana fell more and more short of his dreams. 
Arthegal, or Lord Grey, was ignominiously deprived of his high 
trust. Sidney, the noblest knight in Fairyland, was slain at the 



55 In my treatment of Lycidas I am under great obligations to Dr. J. H. 
Hanf ord. He has made a sound study of this type in his essay on ' ' The 
Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas," Publ. Mod. Lang. Assoc, vol. xxv, 
no. 3, September, 1910, pp. 403 sq. 



362 University of California PuMications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

climax of his career. Perhaps Milton gave up Arthur because 
long years of political wrangling made him, like Spenser, lose 
faith in England's brilliant future. Sir Calidore, Sir Lamorack, 
and Sir Pelleas had failed to bind Slander, the Blatant Beast. 
The monster lived on to bring shame and distress and disillusion- 
ment upon Milton. 

"Paradise Lost" 

But when the storm and stress period ceased for Milton he 
bethought him of another subject upon which, along with that 
of King Arthur, he had long pondered. Milton manuscripts 
have preserved for us a number of drafts of a projected play 
on the subject of the fall of Adam. One striking fact has not 
been hitherto commented upon. Had Milton worked out Para- 
dise Lost along the lines of these early drafts he would un- 
questionably have written a Spenserian poem quite in the manner 
of the School of the Fletchers. His sketches are full of the 
allegories particularly cultivated by his early favorites, the 
seventeenth century Spenserians. He may have seen the Adamo 
of Andreini while in Italy and have derived inspiration from its 
allegorical episodes. But the allegories of Spenser and the 
Fletchers are much closer to the manuscript jottings. And we 
know that Spenser and the Fletchers ranked high among his 
favorite poets. Faith, Hope, and Charity are called in to 
instruct Adam at his repentance as they instruct Spenser's 
remorseful Red Cross Knight in the House of Holiness. Spen- 
ser's allegory of repentance was closely imitated by William 
Browne in his Britannia's Pastorals and, as we have seen, by 
Thomas Robinson and Dr. Joseph Beaumont, two members of 
the School of the Fletchers. Mercy and Justice debate as they 
debated in Giles Fletcher's Christ^^ and Phineas Fletcher's 
Purple Island. Conscience, a favorite with Phineas Fletcher, 
Thomas Robinson, and Dr. Joseph Beaumont, was to have been 
active in the story of Adam. There is more than enough to 
show that Milton was full of the fancies of Spenser and of his 



56 A very popular mediae\-al allegory, of course. See Miss Hope Travers ' 
The Allegory of the Four Daughters of God, Bryn Mawr Dissertation, 1908. 



1912] Cory : Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Miltoii. 363 

Cambridge followers. And Milton never passed utterly beyond 
this type of influence even in his mature epic period. I have 
already stated that Phineas Fletcher had given in his Apollyon- 
ists and Locustae a spirited picture of the conclave in Hell. 
With him the character of Lucifer, the fiery orator and un- 
repentant rebel, assumed some of the grandeur that we now 
call Miltonic." The Psyche of Dr. Joseph Beaumont has been 
plausibly conceived to have influenced Milton in his portrait of 
Satan and his cohorts, though Milton's fiends are far less 
grotesque. As Macaulay puts it : " They have no horns, no tails, 
none of the fee-faw-fum of Tasso and Klopstock," — and, we 
may well add, of Beaumont. Vondel and other continental poets 
had been mindful of the impressiveness of Lucifer. But for our 
purposes we might even accept without question every new 
source that is suggested for Paradise Lost without taking from 
the importance of the Fletchers in their relation to Milton.^® 
Milton seldom conceived a picture that was not vivified by com- 
bined impressions from a dozen sources from which he extracted 
his elixir. 

From now on, except for brief and exquisite allusions to the 
land of Faerie, we shall find Milton influenced mostly by the 
sterner side of Spenser. In the very first book of Paradise Lost 
the picture of Mammon among the fallen angels derives from 
Spenser's grim IMammon who lured Sir Guy on underground: 

"Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell 
Prom Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts 
Were always downward bent, admiring more 
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold, 
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed , 

In vision beatific. . . . ." 



5T We may note here that Dr. Grosart, in his preface to his edition of 
Phineas Fletcher, lists a great number of passages from Milton 's works which 
he considers to be verbal echoes of the poems of the two Fletchers. Some 
of thQse are certainly convincing; others as certainly absurd. 

58 In regard to Vondel 's influence it is to be observed that Mr. Edmund- 
son 's excellent, if too enthusiastic, Milton and Vondel pleads very per- 
suasively for Vondellian inspiration. Yet Mr. Verity in the preface to his 
edition of Paradise Lost, denies the possibility with strong arguments. The 
present writer has already stated that this paper is, to a certain extent, 
a protest against the over-emphasis which he conceives to be placed on 
Milton's continental sources. 



364 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

Spenser had already placed Mammon's abode near the gate of 

Hell where sat the terrible figures of Revenge, Treason, Hate, 

Jealousy, and Fear, — a scene which we have found Milton closely 

imitating in his In Quintum Novemhris. In both Spenser and 

Milton, Mammon is assisted by fiends who in cells and furnaces 

prepare the liquid gold. It is a stimulating study in artistry to 

compare the quaint, grotesque lines of Spenser with the gloomy 

pomp of Milton. In The Faerie Queene : 

"One with great bellowes gathered filling ayre 
And with forst wind the fewell did inflame; 
Another did the dying bronds repayre 
With yron tongs, and sprinckled ofte the same. 
With liquid waves, fiers Vulcans rage to tame. 
Who, maystring them, renewd his former heat; 
Some scumd the drosse, that from the metall came. "59 

So Milton's fiends, in three groups, with "hands innumerable" 
and "incessant toil" were busy 

"Severing each kind, and scummed the bullion-dross." 

Spenser's fiends are grim as Durer's grotesque woodcuts are grim. 

The figures in Milton's passages have the impressive Miltonic 

vagueness. There are, as in Spenser, imps with bellows who 

"By strange conveyance filled each hollow nook; 
As in an organ, from one blast of wind. 
To many a row of pipes the sound-board breathes." 

a sounding and inappropriate simile that would have stirred 
Spenser with a childlike delight if he could have read it. But 
these Spenserian demons, in Milton's hands, reared Pande- 
monium, a massive structure which human eyes had never really 
seen till Milton sang grandly of it : 

"Anon out of the earth a fabric huge 
Eose like an exhalation, with the sound 
Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet — 
Built like a temple, where pilasters round 
Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid 
With golden architrave; nor did there want 
Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven: 
The roof was fretted gold. Not Babilon 



59 The Faerie Queene, 2, 7, 35 sq. 



1912] Cory : Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 365 

Nor great Alcairo such magnificence 
Equalled in all their glories, to enshrine 
Belus or Serapis their gods, or seat 
Their kings, when Aegypt with Assyria strove 
In wealth and luxury." 

The famous allegory of Sin and Death, in the second book, 
has a long and complicated genealogy including a number of 
Spenserian ancestors. Satan, ascending to seek the World and 
Man found the gates of Hell closed and 

"On either side a formidable Shape. 
The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair, 
But ended foul in many a scaly fold, 
Voluminous and vast — a serpent armed 
With mortal sting. About her middle round 
A cry of Hell-hounds never-ceasing barked 
With wide Cerberean mouths full loud and rung 
A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep, 
If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb. 
And kennel there; yet there still barked and howled 
Within unseen. Far less abhorred than these 
Vexed Seylla, bathing in the sea that parts 
Calabria from the hoarse Tinacrian shore." 

Homer's Seylla is indeed like Milton's Sin. But Homer's en- 
chantresses and monsters, Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, Seylla, had 
a complicated development which must be glanced at here. 
Sometimes the enchantress became merely a beautiful mortal 
tempting the hero to give over his perilous quest. So Virgil's 
Dido allured Aeneas. Tasso's Armida, the Venus of Camoens, 
Spenser's Acrasia are poetic daughters of Circe, portrayed with 
all the charm that exquisite art can give to wantonness. Ariosto 's 
Alcina and Spenser's Duessa, for whose loathsomeness the poet 
of The Faerie Queen was impelled to borrow unhappily from 
Ariosto 's picture of the unmasking of Alcina, are beautiful to 
the deluded sinner whom they enchant but in reality are horrible 
and filthy hags. From Duessa Phineas Fletcher developed those 
unspeakably nasty figures of Caro (the Flesh), and Harmatia 
(Sin), in The Purple Island and of Sin in The Apollyonists. 
We have already seen that Spenser adopted from Virgil the 
device of placing grim allegorical figures at the gates of Hell 



366 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

and that Milton followed him closely in his vicious attack upon 
Roman Catholicicism, In Quintum Novemhris. We have also 
seen that in the first canto of The A'pollyonists Phineas Fletcher 
combines Spenser's scenes at the gates of Hell and the concep- 
tion of Duessa. We must remember, too, that we find here in 
Fletcher the spirited conclave in Hell, the fiery speeches of 
Satan, the advice of various subtle demons, an episode which 
immediately precedes Satan's ascent to the gates of Hell in 
Paradise Lost. The porter of Hell in Fletcher's poem is Sin, 
depicted with an imaginative vagueness that is in striking antici- 
pation of Milton 's manner : 

"The Porter to th' infernal gate is Sin, 
A shapelesse shape, a foule deformed thing, 
Nor nothing, nor a substance: as those thin 
And empty formes which through the ayer fling 
Their wandring shapes. ' 'so 

Like Milton's figure she is the daughter of the Devil. But to 
deluded youth she is beautiful : 

"Her rosie cheeke, quick eye, her naked brest, 

And whatsoe'er loose fancie might entice. 
She bare expos 'd to sight, all lovely drest 

In beauties livery, and quaint devise." 

Close by her sits Despair. In the entrance dwells Sickness, 
Languor, Fear, Horror. Milton's only other guardian of Hell's 
gate in Paradise Lost is Death : 

" .... The other Shape— 
If shape it might be called that shape had none 
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb; 
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, 
For each seemed either — black it stood as Night, 
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell, 
And shook a dreadful dart "6i 

Spenser, who frequently described Death, anticipated Milton in 
the effective use of vagueness : 



60 The Apollyonists, canto 1, st. 10. 
81 Paradise Lost, book 2, lines 666 sq. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 367 

"Death with most grim and griesly visage seene 
Yet is he nought but parting of the breath; 
Ne ought to see but like a shade to weene, 
Unbodied, unsourd, unheard, unseene. "62 

A sentence in The Gospel of James (1, 15) suggested the allegory 
of Satan's offspring, Sin and Death, which became a convention 
in mediaeval and Renaissance literature. 

But we have looked closely enough at the epic characters who 
did the most to inspire the terrible figures in Milton. To pry 
further would be vain and pedantic here. On the other hand, 
frail must be the sensibilities of the Milton admirer who finds 
this study of sources any occasion for depreciation of Milton's 
fathomless creative power. Thomas Warton well says : 

"We feel a sort of malicious triumph in detecting the latent and 
obscure source from which an original author has drawn some celebrated 
description: yet this .... soon gives way to the rapture that naturally 
results from contemplating the chymical energy of true genius, which can 
produce so noble a transmutation." 

And Shelley felt no shame in prefacing Prometheus Unbound, 
which has the very white-heat of creative power, with a passage 
that should be deeply pondered by those who think that imitation 
is only the faith of the scorned critic and the second-rate poet. 

"As to imitation, poetry is mimetic art. It creates, but it creates by 
combination and representation. Poetical abstractions are beautiful and 
new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous 
existence in the mind of man or in Nature, but because the whole pro- 
duced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy 
with those sources of emotion and thought and with the contemporary 
condition of them. One great poet is a masterpiece of Nature which 
another not only ought to study but must study. He might as wisely 
and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of 
all that is lovely in the visible universe as exclude from his contemplation 
the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary. The 
pretence of doing it would be a presumption in any but the greatest; 
the effect, even in him, would be strained, unnatural and ineffectual. A 
poet is the combined product of such internal powers as modify the 
nature of others, and of such external influences as excite and sustain 
these powers; he is not one, but both. Every man's mind is, in this 
respect, modified by all the objects of Nature and art; by every word and 
every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness; 

62 The Faerie Queene, 7, 7, 46. 



368 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

it is the mirror upon which all forms are reflected and in which they 
compose one form. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, 
sculptors and musicians are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, 
the creations of their age. From this subjection the loftiest do not 
escape. There is a similarity between Homer and Hesiod, between 
Aeschylus and Euripides, between Virgil and Horace, between Dante and 
Petrarch, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Dryden and Pope; 
each has a generic resemblance under which their specific distinctions are 
arranged. If this similarity be the result of imitation, I am willing to 
confess that I have imitated. ' '63 

To the discerning reader a study of these intricate sources of 
Milton 's Sin and Death gives a wonderful glimpse into the poet 's 
workshop. More mysterious than ever, with his manifold sources, 
he is like Spenser 's sage Phantastes : 

"His chamber was dispainted all with in 
With sondry colours, in the which were writ 
Infinite shapes of thinges dispersed thin; 
Some such as in the world were never yit, 
Ne can devized be of mortall wit." 

The sterner side of Spenser, I have said, was what Milton 
found most congenial during the composition of Paradise Lost. 
Many of the minute traces of Spenser's influence here, found in 
abundance by the commentators, support my assertion as well, 
in their way, as the examination of the Sin and Death allegory. 
Such an imposing example of Milton's grandeur, for example, as 
the famous picture of Satan staggering under Michael's terrific 
stroke like a toppling mountain has been shown to bear striking 
resemblance to Spenser's identical simile in the magnificent if 
rhetorical passage which describes the fall of the old Dragon who 
symbolizes the Devil.**^ Interesting, too, it is to compare many 
other parallel passages. Loads of learned lumber on the subject 
are easily accessible in the numerous editions of Milton where the 
younger poet's possible indebtedness in line and phrase seems 
now convincing, noAV doubtful. Out of so many possible borrow- 
ings a fair proportion may be safely accepted. It is hardly neces- 
sary, however, to transcribe them here. 



^s Shelley's Complete Poetical WorTcs (Cambridge Edition, Boston and 
New York, 1901), p. 164. 

64 Paradise Lost, book 6, lines 195 sq. The Faerie Queene, 1, 11, 54. 



1912] Cory: Speaser, Tlie School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 369 

Though the sterner side of Spenser illumined Milton 's gloomy 
sublimity at times when he dwelt upon the tragic contest of pas- 
sions and forces good and evil, there is another striking aspect of 
Spenser's influence upon IMilton in his maturity that is charm- 
ingly inconsistent. We have already seen, in our examination of 
the later poems at Horton, how Spenser's idealism helped Milton 
to overrule his rising bitterness. So too in the stern epics one 
finds, at times, a spirit of wistful reminiscence gracious and heal- 
ing as well as melancholy, which is certainly due in part to the 
persuasive inspiration of the acknowledged master. The coldest 
readers of Milton are won completely by the austere poet when 
he allows himself brief recollections of the sensuous dreams of 
The Faerie Queene. Eden is described with Spenserian ardor. 
In a passage rich w-ith allusion Milton recalls one of Spenser's 
most enchanting additions to classical mythology, the Gardens 
of Adonis.^^ Satan saw : 

' ' Among thick-woven arborets, and flowers 
Imbordered on each bank, the hand of Eve: 
Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned 
Or of revived Adonis, or renowned 
Alcinoiis, host of old Laertes ' son, 
' Or that, not mystic, where the sapient king 
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse. ' ' 

Though Milton was sternly renouncing these fancies he was 

renouncing them with an audible sigh. The beautiful lines in 

the ninth book in which he puts them from him, touching them, 

as he turns from them, with a splendor like a lingering sunset, 

cannot be read without a feeling of longing for what Milton 

might have done. , He invokes 

" .... My celestial Patroness, who deigns 
Her nightly visitation unimplored. 
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires 
Easy my unpremeditated verse 
Since first this subject for heroic song 
Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late. 
Not sedulous by nature to indite 



65 Milton, Paradise Lost, 9, 437 sq. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 3, 6. 
Unsuccessful attempts have been made to find the tradition of the Gardens 
of Adonis in Pliny, Nat. Hist., xix, 4. 



370 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

Wars, hitherto the only argument 
Heroic deemed, chief maistrie to dissect 
With long and tedious havoc fabled knights 
In battles feigned (the better fortitude 
Of patience and heroic matyrdom 
Unsung), or to describe races and games, 
Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields, 
Impreses quaint, caparisons and steeds. 
Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights 
At joust and tournament. ' '66 

"Paradise Regained" 

Yet with all his austerity this spirit of wistful reminiscence 
was to survive, throughout Paradise Regained, although that 
poem begins to show traces, as everybody knows, of the severity 
which culminates in the rarified music of Samson Agonistes. 
Giles Fletcher's Christ's Triumph and Victory had dwelt with 
the subject of the Saviour's temptation, always with quaint, stiff 
beauty, occasionally with religious fire that burns clear white 
even to-day. We have seen how closely he followed Spenser. 
Satan, disguised as an aged hermit, is no more than Archimago 
who masqueraded in similar fashion to deceive the Red Cross 
Knight. Like the Red Cross Knight, Christ is brought to the 
Cave of Despair where, as we have seen, Fletcher follows his 
master almost verbatim. Satan then tempts Christ with the true 
luxurious abandon of the Renaissance. Christ's worldly am- 
bition is tested by Presumption in her airy pavilion, 

"Over the Temple, the bright stars among." 
He is then brought to the "Bowre of Vaine-Delight. " It is 
worth while intrinsically to quote once more two of the stanzas 
which follow Spenser's Bower of Bliss so quaintly and prettily: 

"The garden like a Ladie faire was cut, 
That lay as if shee slumber 'd in delight. 
And to the open skies her eyes did shut; 
The azure fields of heav'n wear sembled right 
In a large round, set with flow 'rs of light. 
The flow'rs-de-luce, and the round sparks of deaw, 
That hung upon their azure leaves, did shew 
Like twinkling Starrs, that sparkle in the eavning blew. 



«6 Paradise Lost, book 9, lines 20 sq. 



1912] Cory: Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 371 

"Upon a hillie banke her head shee cast, 
On which the bowre of Vaine-Delight was built, 
White and red roses for her face wear plac't, 
And for her tresses Marigolds wear spilt: 
Them broadly shee displaid, like flaming guilt, 
Till in the ocean the glad day wear drown 'd. 
Then up againe her yellow locks she wound, 
And with green fillets in their prettie calls them bound. ' ' 

This is exactly what we should expect from a pleasure-loving 
worldly son of the Renaissance. These voluptuous ascetics were 
fain to decorate the spare lines of the Scriptural stories with 
delight on delight until they forgot the motif of their poems in 
their naive joy in the World and the Flesh. Milton seems to 
have intended a conscious revolt against the Bowre of Bliss 
device. "Set women in his eye and in his walk," said dissolute 
Belial to Satan, meditating an assault on Christ. But Satan 
rejects the advice with magnificent scorn. Here the poet speaks 
in person. Practice, however, fell somewhat short of what Milton 
undoubtedly intended in theory. As Spenser tempted Guyon 
with Philotime (Worldly Ambition), and the lascivious Acrasia, 
as Giles Fletcher followed by choosing Ambition and Wanton- 
ness, so Milton, following too at a greater distance, did nothing 
more than discard the allegory and chose precisely the same 
epicurian type of temptation. Such Spenserianism lent only 
a gaudy color to the sober me?" ares of Paradise Regained and 
we cannot thank Milton's mascer for an influence which caused 
such futile divagations. What does, however, dwell with the 
lover of Spenser is Milton 's brief, wistful recollection of what he 
might have written ha^^ he remained in Fairyland, the thoughts 

"Of faery dam&els met in forest wide 
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, 
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore. " 

''Samson Agonistes" 

There is no Spenser in Samson Agonistes. It is the most 
personal of Milton's poems. In music rarified like mountain 
air Milton spoke entirely of his own griefs and closed with a 
hymn of victory so austere that to the weak majority of men it 



372 University of California Publications in Modern Philology. [Vol. 2 

sounds like despair. The last gleam of the faiths that Spenser 
cherished had Moaned. It is difficult for us to realize with 
sufficient dramatic intensity the awful depth of the spiritual 
tragedy that reached its catastrophe for Milton with the Restora- 
tion. Elsewhere I have written of this age as an Age of Literary 
Anarchy, a period of intellectual strife and bewilderment that 
struck dead most faiths. Samson Agonisies, if we understand it 
with dramatic sympathy, should appeal to us more than any of 
Milton's other poems. It should set fire to the spirit of hero- 
worship that is in all of us. For while this grand poem burns 
with his sorrow over his blindness, his bitterness towards women, 
the defeat of his political cause, while it breathes his large hatreds 
and his petty hatreds, yet from the depths Samson emerges. The 
poem trumpets Milton 's love and fear of God, a God as terrible as 
the Hebraic Jehovah, but a God who has his appeal to all good 
fighting-men. Milton drew proudly aloof from his age and rose 
above it — not selfishly but to show to his distracted fellow-men 
the triumph of life. He who would truly love Milton must learn 
to love him not only when he dreamed delightedly with Spenser 
and when he looked back longingly to the Fairyland of Spenser 
which he had elected to leave, but also finally when in all his 
gloom he forged out the proud faith that is uttered in the noble 
stoical lines of Manoa : 

"Come, come; no time for lamentation now, 
Nor much more cause. Samson hath quit himself 
Like Samson, and heroicly hath finished 
A life heroic." 

Here, not in the noisy bravado of Nietzche's creation, de we find 
the true superman. This sternness was not Spenser 's. The spirit 
of wistful reminiscence had faded. The gentle land of Faerie 
had crumbled away. But out of all the sorrows of its loss what 
a mighty victory had Milton won when his voice uttered the 
last words of his chorus ! I am not concerned with the truth or 
untruth of its orthodox tenets. It is so easy to jeer at high 
heaven that these last words of Milton may seem superficial 
enough to many. But as a faith sounded forth from the depths, 



1912] Cory : Spenser, The School of the Fletchers, and Milton. 373 

after the bitterest of life-struggles, is there not the awe of divine 
things in its calm? 

"All is best, though we oft doubt 
What the unsearchable dispose 
Of Highest Wisdom bring about, 
And ever best found in the close. 
Oft He seems to hide his face, 
But unexpectedly returns, 
And to his faithful Champion hath in place 
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns. 
And all that band them to resist 
His uncontrollable intent. 
His servants He, with new acquist 
Of true experience from this great event, 
With pride and consolation hath dismissed, 
And calm of mind, all passion spent. ' ' 



UNIVEESITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS— (Continued) 

S. The Conspiracy at Borne in 66-65 B.C., by H. C. Nutting. January, 
1910 „ „. 10 

4. On the Contracted Genitive in I in Latin, by William A. Merrill. Pp. 

57-79, February, 1910 .25 

5. Epaphos and the Egyptian Apis, by Ivan M. Linforth. Pp. 81-92. 

August, 1910 10 

6. Studies in the Text of Lucretius, by William A. Merrill. Pp. 93-150. 

June, 1911 50 

7. The Separation of the Attributive Adjective from its Substantive In 

Plautus, by Winthrop L. Keep. Pp. 151-164. June, 1911 15 

8. The 'Oapio-Tvs of Theocritus, by Edward B. Clapp. Pp. 165-171. Oc- 

tober, 1911 _ 15 

9. Notes on the Text of the Corpus Tibullianum, by Monroe E. Deutsch. 

Pp. 173-226. June, 1912 50 

SEMITIC PHILOLOGY.— William Popper, Editor. 

Vol. 1. 1907-. (In progress.) 

1. The Supposed Hebraisms in the Grammar of Biblical Aramaic, by 

Herbert Harry Powell. Pp. 1-55. February, 1907 „ 75 

Vol. 2. 1909— (In progress.) 

1. Ibn Taghri Eirdi: An-Nujlim az-ZahlrS fi Mulfik Misr wal-Kahira (No. 

1 of Vol. 2, part 2). Edited by William Popper. Pp. 1-128. Sep- 
tember, 1909 „ „ _ 1.50 

2. Idem (No. 2 of Vol. 2, part 2). Pp. 129-297. October, 1910 1.50 

3. Idem (No. 3 of Vol. 2, part 2). Pp. 298-297. January, 1912. 

Index, pp. 392-534. 
Glossary, etc., pp. lx-1. 

Volume 2 complete, 50 + 534 pages 4.00 

The publication of this text will be continued. European orders for the parta of this 
volome as published may be sent to Late E. J. Brill, Ltd., Leiden. 

ECONOMICS.— Adolph C. Miller, Editor. 

Vol. 1. Gold, Prices and Wages under the Greenback Standard, by Wesley 0, 

MitchelL 632 pages, with 12 charts. March, 1908 _.. $5.00 

Vol. 2. A History of California Labor Legislation, with a Sketch of the San Fran- 
cisco Labor Movement, by Lucile Eaves. 461 pages. August 23, 1910 4.00 

EDUCATION. 

Vol. 4. The Development of the Senses in the First Three Years of Childhood, by 

Milicent Washburn Shinn. 235 pages and Index. July, 1908.„ 2.00 

A continuation of the author's Notes on the Development of a Child (Vol. 1 of this 
series, 423 pages, 1893-1899, reprinted March, 1909, $3.50). 

Vol. 6. 1. Superstition and Education, by Fletcher Bascom Dresslar. 239 pages. 

July, 1907 — ..„ - 2.00 

EGYPTIAN AECHAEOLOGY. (Quarto.) 

Vol. 1. The Hearst Medical Papyrus. Hieratic Text in 17 facsimile plates in collotype, 

with Introduction and Vocabulary, by George A. Reisner. 48 pages. 1905 25 marks 
Vol, 2. The Early Dynastic Cemeteries of Naga-ed-Der, Part I, by G. A. Reisner. 172 

pages, 80 plates, 211 text-figiures. 1908 75 marks 

Vol. 3. The Early Dynastic Cemeteries at Naga-ed-DSr, Part II, by A. 0. Mace, xl f 

88 pages, with 60 plates and 123 text-figures. 1909 50 marks 

For sale by J. 0. Hinrichs Verlag, Leipzig, Germany. Copies for exchange may be 
obtained from the University Press, Berkeley. 




XJNIVERSITT OF CALIFORNIA PU 

GEAEOO-EOMAN AECHAEOLOOY. (Quarto.) 014 135 943 5 P 

Vol. 1. The Tebtimis Papyri, Part 1. Edited by Beraard P. Grenfell, Arthur S. 
Hunt, and S. Gilbart Smyly. ziz + 674 pa{[es, with 9 collotype plates. 
1902. £2 5s, $16. 

Vol. 2. The Tebtunis Papyri, Part 2. Edited by Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur 
S. Hunt, with the assistance of Edgar J. Goodspeed. xy14-485 pages 
and 2 collotype plates, with map. 1907. 

Vol. 3. The Tebtunis Papsrri, Part 3. Edited by Bernard P. Grenfell, Arthur 8. 
Hunt, and J. Gilbart nmyly. (In preparation.) 

For sale by the Oxford University Press (Henry Frowde), Amen Comer, London, 
E.C. (£2 5s), and 91-93 Fifth avenue. New York ($16). Copies for exchange may be 
obtained from the University Press, Berkeley. 

AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY.— Alfred L. Kroeber, Editor. Price per 
volume $3.50 (Volume 1, $4.25). VolmnGs 1-9 completed. Volume 10 in progress. 

BOTANY.— William A, Setchell, Editor. Price per volume $3.50. Volumes I (pp. 418), II 
(pp. 360), and in (pp. 400) completed. Volume IV in progress. 

GEOLOGY.— Bulletin of the Department of Geology. Andrew C. Lawson and John C. Mer- 
riam, Editors. Price per volume $3.50. Volumes I (pp. 428), II (pp. 450), in (pp. 
475), rv (pp. 462), V (pp. 458) and VI completed. Volume VII in progress. 

MATHEMATICS.— MeUen W. Haskell. Editor. 

Vol. 1. 1. On Numbers having no Factors of the Form p (kp -f 1), by Henry W. 
Stager. Pp. 1-26. June, 1912. 

PSYCHOLOGY. — George M. Stratton, Editor. 

Vol. 1. 1. The Judgment of Difference, with Special Reference to the Doctrine 
of the Threshold, in the Case of Lifted Weights, by Warner Brown. 

Pp. 1-71, 4 text figures. September 24, 1910 _ .50 

2. The Process of Abstraction, an Experimental Study, by Thomas Vomer 

Moore. Pp. 73-197, 6 text figures. November 12, 1910 1.00 

ZOOLOGY. — ^W. E. Eitter and C. A. Kofoid, Editors. Price per volume $3.50. Volumes t 
(pp. 317), II (pp. 382), III (pp. 383), IV (pp. 400), V (pp. 440), VI (pp. 478), VII 
(pp. 446), and VIII (pp. 357) completed. Volumes IX and X in progress. Com- 
mencing with Volume II, this series contains the Contributions from the Laboratory 
of the Marine Biological Association of San Diego. 

MEMOIRS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (Quarto). 

Vol. 1. 1. Triassic Ichthyosauria, with special reference to the American Forms, 
by John C. Merriam. Pp. 1-196; plates 1-18; 154 t«rt-flgures. Sep- 
tember, 1908 $3.00 

2. Silva of California, by W. L. Jepson. Pp. 480; plates 85. December, 
1910. $9; buckram, $10; carriage extra. 

UNIVERSITY OP CALIFORNIA CHRONICLE.— An oflcial record of University life, 
1 issued quarterly, edited by a committee of the Faculty. Price $1 per year. Ourrwxt 
volume No. XIV. 

Address all orders or requests for information concerning the above publications to The 
Uaiversity Press, Berkeley, California. 

Eurc^ean agent for the series In American Archaeology and Ethnology, Classical Phil- 
ology, Education, Modem Philology, Philosophy, and Semitic Philology, Otto Harrassowits. 
Lrlpzig. For the Memoirs, and the series in Botany, Geology, Pathology, Physiology, 
Zoology and also American Archaeology and Ethnology, R. Friedlander & Sohn, Berlin. 



